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Current Issue: Jan.-Feb. 2008
Munis play it safe with wireless
U.S. municipalities abandon residential ISP business models in favor of public safety services
by Jim Barthold
As mobile wireless pushes into its third and even fourth generation, municipal wireless — also sometimes known as municipal WiFi — is moving into a second-generation model many observers believe will flourish and expand.
Muni wireless initially was hyped as a way for municipalities to bridge the digital divide via WiFi networks that offered free or low-cost Internet service to residents. That first generation model gained momentum as cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia enlisted outside help running the networks from established ISPs such as EarthLink that were anxious to shed their dial-up roots and move into the broadband space.
As a business model, while not a complete disaster, "it’s pretty clear [it] doesn’t work," says Stan Schatt, vice president/research director of ABI Research. "There were some pretty unrealistic expectations."
Those expectations ranged from having too much faith in early generation WiFi technology to believing that advertising and low-priced subscriptions would provide adequate financial return to pay for the network’s operation.
"Wi-Fi," Schatt says "can’t be everywhere. It was never designed to be a long-range technology."
Targeting audiences
Wireless technology, though, can be used as an inexpensive, relatively reliable way to move large data files among targeted audiences within municipal zones.
The muni market, therefore, is "transitioning from generation one or rev one of muni WiFi to mobile broadband networks that are focused on public safety and public works," says Jim Freeze, senior vice president of marketing and alliances at BelAir Networks, a U.S.-based provider of wireless public safety networks. "The market is very much in transition from that irrational exuberance around free WiFi, which just frankly is silly. The business model doesn’t work."
While some cities, already having built these networks, will probably continue with the first generation model, many others are doing an about-face and moving to second generation. Those just starting in the wireless space are almost all following a second- generation path.
"Of the cities that went down a path toward this whole free model, you’ll probably see the Tier 2, Tier 3 cities change course and move forward in some other way," says Craig Settles, president of Successful.com and author of the book, After Muni Wireless Comes Down, which Settles describes as "a book for all those cities going down the smart path that are developing networks for their cities — a guide for how to deploy the actual applications that will run on those networks."
The applications will help improve city services from municipal departments to emergency services "because that’s where there is value and justified expense," Settles says.
City uses
The city can use a wireless network to connect free-roaming employees with a central command post and for controlling traffic signals and monitoring traffic patterns. Emergency vehicles like ambulances and police cars are being equipped with in-vehicle wireless capabilities that link back to the network and strategic locations are being outfitted with wireless video surveillance equipment.
This second generation model does not necessarily exclude the public. After the city has wrung out every municipal use, the network can be tapped as a tourist or business WiFi corridor or even be linked to an anchor tenant like a large hospital willing to pay for the connection.
"What people pick is going to be different in each city," Settles says. "You have to do a necessary need assessment of your constituents to figure out what beyond the government is going to make sense."
In Oklahoma City, information technology director Mark Meier chuckles when he sees municipalities scampering to develop or revise wireless models.
"It’s a little bit funny because five years ago we put in our WiFi with the express purpose that it was going to serve a city need," Meier says. "We purchased strictly from the criteria that it was a more cost-effective and superior solution to the traditional RF-based solutions that were available at the time."
The need for speed
RF at the time delivered 19.2kbps of throughput for emergency vehicles, slow data and impossible video. Oklahoma City wanted much more and "after we analyzed all the features and functions we thought wireless mesh was the one most capable of delivering what we wanted," Meir says.
The city wanted "what everyone has come to accept as normal: pictures in the police cars; firefighters able to get blueprints of buildings; water workers able to find water pipes through GIS (geographic information system) out in the field; work order systems with associated data and the images and engineering drawings in the field; accelerated land development by having inspectors being able to report and approve on the same day. That almost knocks RF off the table," he says.
Tropos Networks’ mesh wireless network was even cheaper than RF, Meier says, and the mesh made it reasonable to deliver high-throughput broadband around a widespread 621 square mile city.
"When you have 20 or 30 (radios and WiFi-equipped vehicles) in an area they actually create their own mesh and extend the coverage areas," Meier says. "You have this high power unit inside the car that’s capable of speaking to a fixed node that is a mile or more away, and you can have a low-powered laptop or handheld device within 300 feet of the vehicle."
Meier says he also recognizes the social impact the network can achieve.
"I want to allow students to be able to access the schools’ Web sites and allow schools to encourage students to access the Internet through their own internal resources," he said. "That’s one of the things WiFi brings; it gives you the flexibility to say this isn’t just about police and fire — it's about everybody who provides a service becoming quicker, more mobile and more efficient."
Overall public use, per se, was a secondary reason why muni wireless cracked the Tucson, Ariz., market. The primary reason was to save money — about $200,000 per year — on phone lines used to interconnect the city’s traffic system — although the way the city got money to build the network was to leverage its public safety needs.
Dropping phone lines
"We’re dropping all our phone lines and we’re going to use radios," says Francisco Leyva, the city’s project manager.
Those radios will be able to deliver video from key intersections that can be shared with police or fire departments. On top of that, the city is equipping its ambulance fleet with in-vehicle WiFi capabilities. That use, not coincidentally, was why the city started looking at WiFi in the first place because that’s where it could find the money.
"We looked for the hospital and our fire department and created the ER-Link program to provide a service for which funding was available. As an extra, we have been able to have many other communications after that," Leyva says.
With the strategically placed network, an in-vehicle wireless network links video in an ambulance with the emergency room at the University Medical Center.
"The ambulance will be driving 45, 50 miles an hour throughout the city while having a conference with the hospital [with] voice, video, vital signs and the ability to plug in devices," Leyva says.
WiFi within the ambulance is something that doesn’t necessary require WiFi outside the ambulance, says Mark Zavadsky, director of Tri-State Ambulance in LaCrosse, Wis., which uses Alltel’s 2G cellular network to connect its ambulances with emergency centers within a 2,200 square mile service area, including "some pretty rural parts of western Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota.
"To be fair, we’re not sending a whole bunch of huge graphic files through the IP connection and through the broadband connection," he says.
More broadband would be nice, he concedes, but "our coverage is far beyond the city’s WiFi coverage — and we need the reliable connection no matter where we go."
Tucson, he says, presented a different use case, especially geographically.
"They have a fire-based EMS system that does not respond outside the city. Where you have a regional provider like we are, you really cannot invest heavily in a technology you’re only going to be able to use in a portion of your coverage area," Zavadsky says.
That digital divide
A growing number of municipalities such as Oklahoma City and Tucson, though, can and are taking advantage of WiFi to offer city services that can include the public but don’t necessarily bridge the digital divide with residential connectivity.
"We’re talking about sharing it with the public," Leyva says. "We want to share this in the buses to entice people to ride instead of driving cars, and they can have free Internet access while doing that."
That could be the kind of enticement a city needs to move the public off the roads and onto public transportation. At the very least, the WiFi can make public transit more efficient.
"Every city in the United States has difficulty with transit, but you have cities now that are starting to integrate, through WiFi, internal Internet access inside the buses through the intelligent traffic system to give the buses green lights; tied to GPS Web sites to tell you where the bus is and whether it’s late or on time; tied to video inside the businesses so you can see if there’s an incident. Those are capabilities WiFi gives you that the cell guys can’t," says Oklahoma City’s Meier.
Ah yes, cells. They may be the future of mobile wireless but when it comes to mobile municipal wireless, it’s "not a WiFi vs. cell; the challenge is to define what you’re trying to accomplish and then choose the model that best fits your need," Meier says.
"If all you’re going to do is talk on the phone you could leverage 3G, but if you’re going to do video surveillance over an entire network, a video surveillance camera takes anywhere from 2 to 5 megs per camera [and] you can’t do that on a 3G network," Freeze says.
The next generation
WiFi, positioned properly throughout a community, can make the difference in the second-generation muni model, Schatt concludes.
"WiFi can’t be everywhere. It was never designed to be a long-range technology. We’re never going to have more than WiFi corridors," he says.
For most cities, including those overseas like London, where The Cloud is operating a broadband wireless network, that’s enough.
"The Cloud in London ... has done the heart of the hotel district, the metro area there, but there’s no attempt to do every single part of London," Schatt says. "Palo Alto (Calif.) is another good example of where they’re using it right. It’s a WiFi corridor. They have some of the main streets set up and you walk through there and have WiFi."
Those corridors can later be widened to meet demand from new consumer or city needs. Certainly, the means to do that is also improving.
"Technology in general, muni wireless or broadband wireless or mobile broadband, that’s all going to go where the primary end user benefits," says Ron Sege, president/CEO of Tropos Networks. "Meeting the need for consumer access, whether it’s in Philadelphia or Mountain View (Calif.) or St. Cloud (Fla.) has challenged the technology to be better than it ever was before because consumers use a wide variety of devices, and try to connect from everywhere."
And the wise cities are the ones that realize those consumers can, in the end, benefit from a municipal network but the cities themselves must first take a cut.
The smart cities that were already going down the right path and focusing on city and key constituent groups first, not consumers, will be successful," Settles said. "They will be your success stories."
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