The internet is becoming wireless, pervasive, localized. This will have profound economic, social, and political effects. Just as the internet made netroots possible, so will the emergence of community intranets, the internet localized, truly change communities, local economies and grassroots politics.
The future belongs to the local and to the people, and there is precious little the media, corporations, and government can do. Grassroots, bottom up will outdo the top down. It is inevitable.
What Esme Vos has dubbed Muniwireless is an inevitability. It is as inevitable as Moore’s Law, as inevitable as ubiquitous computing. In the near future the Internet will be ‘everyware’ — with devices of all sorts all around us connecting to us and to each other. Our very environments — home, office, and in-between — will be suffused with, saturated by, the Internet. Capacity is going to infinity while cost goes to zero, at least that’s the conclusion as we extrapolate from the trends of the last fifty years of computing. As Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon, noted in his keynote speech at this year’s CTIA,
“Now wireless is about to enter a new era, where wireless will connect everything: not just people-to-people, but also people-to-machine and machine-to-machine. In this model, there is literally no limit on the number of connections that can be part of the mobile grid: cars, appliances, buildings, roads, sensors, medical monitors, someday even inventories on supermarket shelves … all of these have the potential to become inherently intelligent, perpetually connected nodes on the mobile web”
The telecom giants have long anticipated this eventual future of pervasive wireless, and, along with the Googles of the world, they plan to build it, to capture that value.
So it’s inevitable. Municipalities will go wireless if only because the world itself is going wireless. For entrepreneurs in the muniwireless space, who likewise saw the endpoint even as they were starting out, the question has always been ‘who will build this, who will own this, to what end?’ Would it be the local phone/cable duopoly, the megaportals (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo), some combination, or the communities themselves, acting after the interests of those communities? Early on, the battle lines were drawn. When in 2004 Earthlink and Philadelphia first announced their plans for muniwireless, Verizon lobbied to have the deal contingent on giving them right of first refusal for every other municipality in Pennsylvania, and there and in other states, they and other telecom giants got their way. The argument that prevailed was that government should not put itself in competition with the private sector by supporting muniwireless. Needless to say a lot of telecom lobbying dollars paid for a number of favorable state and federal level verdicts.
As it turned out, the large incumbents did not have much to worry about in this first wave of muni deployments. Wi-Fi, by legislation and given the laws of physics, has a number of limitations. By FCC regulation, it is low power, open, unlicensed spectrum. That leads to lots of interference. Further, the 2.4 GHz spectrum where Wi-Fi operates, unlike what is allotted for cellular, is very poor at penetrating buildings and foliage. The painful outcome of these early efforts was poor coverage and unreliable signals. The initial Wi-Fi devices (laptops mostly, with some PDAs) were few in number and poor in performance. The initial IEEE standards 802.11a,b were quite limited in range. The networking gear available was just plain not capable of delivering satisfactory user experiences to enough users simultaneously. With all that, there were no viable business models. Everyone was either wrong, too early, or both. And all that was before all the added complexities of dealing with municipalities on one hand and the push back from the telecom lobby on the other. As an initial foray, we often didn’t know what we didn’t know. We had to make our mistakes on the road to what we believed one day would be a viable platform.
Here’s a quick overview of some initial efforts:
• Municipal Wi-Fi in Philadelphia: — far too few devices to meet demand (this is 2004-2006), poor network design (mesh/Tropos was not ready to handle voice or video), poor understanding of the importance of useful interfaces (it is not about mere access, but local services), a business model that required that the provider (Earthlink) both pay for the right to build the network, and pay for the network’s maintenance and build out as well. As with Earthlink’s other muni deployments, this project was driven by Earthlink’s understanding that it’s business as a dial-up provider of internet access was drying up, and on a corporate level they knew they needed to try something new and innovative. Unfortunately, they were way too early.
• Wi-Fi for San Francisco via Google (with Earthlink): In short, also too early — another Earthlink failure. After that, public wrangling about having an advertising supported network caused Google to lose interest and the project to a halt.
• Metrofi, AT+T — too early, wrong platform (the Wi-Fi gear they needed to succeed hadn’t been built yet), not enough devices in people’s hands.
• My own Wi-Fi Salon, which from 2006-2008 offered free Wi-Fi to 18 locations in 10 major NYC parks via sponsorships; lots of lessons learned there, but in the end even after $1 mil we didn’t have the network we wanted, the backhaul we wanted, the interface we wanted. Pre-iPhone, there simply weren’t enough devices to drive demand. Finally and came the coup de gras: with the economy cratering late 2008, we couldn’t attract a sponsor to keep it going for 2009; I couldn’t pay the NYC Parks Department their quarterly $7500 concession fee for the right to provide free Wi-Fi (yes, you read that right) and I had to shutter that long experiment.
Timing emerging technologies, and the paradigm shifts they enable, is a tricky business. By definition, a new platform has many dependencies, with some you discover along the way. One such surprise dependency for Wi-Fi Salon was that none of the buildings in NYC’s parks had real world physical addresses, with the result that it took 6 months and $250K paying people to wait around for Verizon or Covad technicians who never came, but kept showing up at bogus addresses outside the parks, then moving on to their next appointments, much to the delight of my sponsors and city officials. Through it all, though, I knew it wasn’t yet time for muniwireless, not until we got to where we could provide ‘good enough’ networks and started to see the traffic levels we needed to.
We all kept tilting at windmills through the years knowing what the endpoint would eventually be — pervasive wireless, changing how we interact both socially and economically within our communities, the internet localized. Wi-Fi itself only existed because it began as a community wireless effort. In the late nineties several engineers living in a suburban enclave in the hills around Silicon Valley couldn’t get anything better than dialup for access. They took the spectrum the FCC left open — for baby monitors, cordless phones — and created a small community wireless network, using a directional antenna that beamed a signal down from a hilltop. Early (very early ) adopters were fashioning antennas out of Pringles cans. From that, a multi-billion dollar industry emerged. Just as around 1995 the Internet took everyone by surprise, so it was with Wi-Fi. People, when given an open platform with no barriers to entry, just ran with it, and only eventually did industry catch up to them. Muniwireless, as an extension and localization of the internet, is driven by this spirit. As muniwireless emerges, watch for what the entrepreneurs come up with.
Now, today, even as we face the most challenging economic conditions in our lifetime, all the elements of that expected platform are maturing, and the platform itself is finally beginning to coalesce. Head down to Rockefeller Plaza or the Concourse below 30 Rock. This is where public Wi-Fi is starting to emerge. As sponsored by NBC’s Syfy Channel. Here’s what you will see there. This is the future of public Wi-Fi, with fiber for backhaul, five state-of-the art access points, and a modular multimedia interface available at the location and on the web that showcases the neighborhood where the Hot Zone operates. More’s to come soon.
Today, a flood of wireless devices hitting the market, led by the iPhone. Everyone — Samsung, Toshiba, Dell, and of course Acer and Asus is putting out their own netbooks. $200 Linux-based netbooks will hit the market soon. Put a VOIP client on such devices (such as a Skype client on an iTouch) and people can make virtually free phone calls. Within 6 months, the device pays for itself. That device in turn is in effect a minicomputer as powerful as a desktop from 2004, and with a huge and growing library of applications to draw from. Such devices will not only save everyone money on phone calls, but also put in people’s hands all they need to participate in the information (and social networking) revolution.
So we are seeing the exponential growth in capability, and an explosion of applications and services for these devices — think of the iPhone app store, and all the app stores now setting up shop — even as the price for all this continues to drop with no real end in sight. So where is this all going? In his latest book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, writes about what happens to (media industry) business models when the price of digital content approaches zero. If content, when digitized and mass replicated, becomes so cheap to produce per unit that it can literally be given away in favor of advertising revenues, upsells, etc, how do you make any money creating content? This is an enormous problem for music, for publishing, for newspapers, for TV and the movies. Whole industries are evaporating as content is increasingly being delivered as bits rather than atoms. Once the content can be delivered as bits, it becomes possible to create and deliver infinite copies at almost zero cost. But to take it a step further from the world of bits to the world of manufacturing, what happens when all the capacity of an iPhone can be delivered at 1/100th the price? How long before the devices, and even the network equipment they depend on, are so cheap to produce, so powerful in their capabilities, that there is no money to be made there either? What if devices and connectivity were so cheap that it could be given away, with revenues coming from advertising, applications and services? That is where we are heading.
Today we are in a strange place where the most advanced devices are becoming the most affordable, precisely because they are the most advanced. A well made device such as the iPhone, the Blackberry, and like devices are becoming ‘must haves’ for all the value they add as communications devices, and as application and service providers. Increasingly, NOT having such a device is exacting a great cost — not being on the grid, not being able to get and share information immediately increasingly impoverishes people, and, collectively, impoverishes nations.
With information itself becoming the coin of the realm, national telecom policy is increasingly bound up in national economic strategy. The more people who are left off the grid, whether because of affordability or availability, the worse off a nation is in the information economy. The U.S., having had no national telecom policy, but a large body of regulations cobbled together by special interest, is simply losing out to countries that have. We currently rank 15th in the world in broadband penetration. We pay a lot more for a lot less than people in other countries. The U.S. has responded with a tepid $7.2 bil plan to bring broadband to underserved and unserved areas, which in a country of 300 million and given our vast geography, will hardly keep us from falling even further behind the rest of the developed world in terms of broadband availability and pricing. While it is at least a start, as with health care reform and banking reform, corporate interests are once again prevailing to the detriment of the citizen, and reform will be defined down as much as is politically possible.
More promising as a matter of telecom policy is the opening up of the so-called White Spaces, spectrum made available when television became all digital this past June. Microsoft, Google, Motorola, Dell, Samsung, Intel, Earthlink and Philips make up The White Space Coalition. They clearly want to challenge the telecoms and the cable companies in providing voice, video and internet access. It will take time to create the devices for this newly opened spectrum — it took seven years to get the several hundred million Wi-Fi enabled devices we see today built and put in people’s hands — and on the gear and regulatory sides it’s a long road ahead, but White Space networks will potentially outperform Wi-Fi by a vast degree, changing the economics of muniwireless entirely. Others are looking at other spectrum, licensed and unlicensed, to make the wireless internet ubiquitous. Verizon is betting on 4G, or LTE, to bring wireless broadband to their customers for instance.
So to return to the original thesis, muniwireless will prevail in one way or another and as a subset of ubiquitous computing. Policy, investment, will help hasten its arrival, mammoth companies are placing big bets to create the necessary infrastructure. But — and this is my key point — as the cost of not only of content but of devices and network hardware and of access itself slides toward zero, the only thing that retains value is what the local community is willing to invest in terms of their interest and content. If local businesses, schools, in the local community, in short, are willing to create local content for the network, post local ads, if they see the service as part of the fabric of the community, if the local wireless service has a local community portal on the larger internet that showcases the community, if the community intranet supports other local wireless services and applications that say monitor energy consumption, or provide increased public safety, how can the telecom giants and the megaportals compete with that?
The trump card that every community holds is this: No one can provide better local content or advertise better to the local community than the community itself. Everyone wants to get local — Google, Microsoft, Citysearch (IAC), Yahoo. As he world goes digital and online, traditional media - newspapers. Local TV and radio, are rapidly disappearing from the landscape. They are losing a crucial source of revenue — local advertising (classifieds) — to the Internet and these megaportals. At the same time, these same companies have a great challenge — how do they capture the local ‘from above,” as a top-down play? On the web, everything is driven by reputation. Do we trust this seller on eBay? Well look at his rating. Want to buy a book? How are people reviewing it? How in turn are people rating the reviewers?
Do I trust someone working for a multibillion dollar global portal to create content, for local knowledge, or do I trust a local? What are the best restaurants in a given neighborhood? I will trust a resident if given the choice. Their informed opinions will be given up freely, out of a desire to share. This is grassroots, not Astroturf.
With the localization of content, services, and advertisements, with more and more devices GPS enabled, with the growing ability to create local ‘intranets’ for buildings, neighborhoods, towns, cities, via new wireless infrastructure deployments, it will be increasingly easy for communities to segment themselves from the rest of the web, and capture the value that is now otherwise feeding these web behemoths. If Google’s model in creating muniwireless as part of The White Space Coalition depends in no small part on local ads, what is to stop the locals from building their own networks and capturing the ad revenue themselves?
As social computing goes local, as the internet grows pervasive, as everyone is brought onto the grid, muniwireless has a bright future. Communities will have wireless networks as public amenities. They will serve a number of functions, from the very basic — offering the ability to surf the web, check email, to supporting local businesses through a local community portal with local content and providing better security. In the process, the web will become increasingly localized. As always, and from the beginning, we know the end points, and as always, it’s getting there that matters, the details of it. Who will be the ones trying, failing, and learning? Who will be the ones that eventually own the solution? Who will build these municipal wireless networks? Will it be the large incumbent telecoms, the Verizons and Comcasts of the world? Or will it be people like you and me? If in the end the value of the community network is derived from the activity of the people using it, we know the answer.
