The trouble with hooking up
Free municipal wireless sounds like a great idea for Boston or any city that has already invested heavily in high-tech infrastructure. Too bad there's no more money to pay for the last link of the chain.
By Hiawatha Bray | August 2, 2009
Brian Worobey stands on the roof of the Tobin Community Center in Boston peering through a telescopic sight, the sort that fits snugly atop a sniper rifle. Spread out before him is a target-rich environment: the town houses of Mission Main, the Alice Taylor homes, the Franklin Square Apartments -- residential space for thousands of Bostonians. From where he is standing, Worobey figures he can hit them all with radio waves capable of carrying Internet data.
The sniper scope is to help him spot a work crew perched on the roof of the Beatty Hall library at the Wentworth Institute of Technology a quarter mile away. That crew and Worobey's are doing the same thing: installing digital radio devices to wirelessly connect computers in homes and businesses to the Internet. Two electricians are setting up a big white box festooned with antennas, wiring it to the city's fiber-optic network.
Worobey points southwest toward Mission Hill, another prime target. "We've got the hill covered reasonably well," he says. "When we light this up, we'll get this whole area covered." This box -- it's one of about 100 wireless networking devices that his nonprofit has installed in Boston -- is yet another step toward Worobey's goal: a city where Internet access flows in the air and where it might eventually carry the same price -- zero. As chief executive and president of OpenAirBoston, Worobey has spent the past three years working toward that goal. In 2006, when he was vice president of information systems at the Museum of Science, he was on a task force established by Mayor Tom Menino to figure out exactly how to set up such a network. The task force report, issued in July of that year, figured the job would take 12 to 18 months and cost $16 million to $20 million. By now, you should be able to stand on any corner, anywhere in town, whip out a wireless-equipped laptop, and get on the city network. Try it in Jamaica Plain or Southie, Allston or Back Bay, and you're in for a disappointment. But try it on Westland Avenue in the Fenway district, or Warren Street in Roxbury, and you'll see that the efforts of OpenAirBoston haven't been entirely fruitless. In about 2 square miles out of Boston's 48, less than 5 percent of the city, you'll find wireless capability, up to 1 million bits per second, that the nonprofit manages. That's not much for YouTube videos. But it's plenty for e-mailing a client or researching homework.
it turns out that building a wireless network that provides coverage to all of Boston is going to take more time -- not more money, though that point is moot since the city doesn't have it budgeted -- than the mayor's task force predicted. In fact, this kind of project has thwarted government leaders and technologists in cities from coast to coast.
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In 2002, I worked with the Cleverminds company, helping a group headed by Mel King, a former Boston City Councilman. King led an effort to provide free WiFi access to the citizens around Tent City in Boston: he founded the South End Technology Center at Tent City. King deserves credit for showing that public WiFi could be done - and on a shoestring budget, at that - which is always the most important part of getting public projects moving - and I'm very surprised that Bray's article doesn't mention his name.
Cisco donated Access Points made for outdoor service: it was my first exposure to Power Over Ethernet (POE). The Boston Linux and Unix User Group
Bray is right when he says it's not enough bandwidth for utube videos (although utube wasn't a factor then), but it _was_ enough to allow bright and curious minds in the inner city to catch a glimpse of the libraries, histories, and opinions available outside Roxbury.