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Cleveland will join trend of citywide wireless Internet access(News-Herald, The (Willoughby, OH) (KRT)) Dec. 17--City officials in Tempe, Ariz., held a "cutting the wires" ceremony on Nov. 28, celebrating the fact the Phoenix suburb will become the first municipality of its size in the United States to have wireless Internet access citywide. The home of Arizona State University is scheduled to have Wi-Fi, as it is known, for all of its 160,000 residents in February. The size distinction, however, won't hold for long. New Orleans, seeking an economic boost after Hurricane Katrina, launched its own wireless network a day after Tempe cut the wires. Build-out continues, but businesspeople will be checking e-mail and high school students will be downloading music from laptops across the whole city in about a year. Philadelphia has teamed up with Earthlink to provide Wi-Fi for the whole city, and folks there are optimistic it will be operational by late 2006. San Francisco has received a much-publicized proposal from Google to unwire that city. Closer to home, Akron has chosen a company to provide it with metropolitan Wi-Fi. So has Cuyahoga Falls. All of that begs the question "What about Cleveland?" The city on the North Coast is, after all, home to thousands of wireless "hotspots," including free, as-fast-as-it-gets service at Case Western Reserve University and the surrounding University Circle area. Just a few short months ago, chip-making giant Intel Corporation, dubbed Cleveland one of three "digital communities" in the world and announced an initiative that would help the city use wireless and other innovative applications to expand services for the city, businesses and residents. The initiative is "Cleveland's way of luring technological companies and showing people we're above the curve and ahead of the game," said Wendy Boerger, spokeswoman for Mayor Jane Campbell. So where, you might ask, is city-wide Wi-Fi for Greater Cleveland? It's safe to say it's coming. Lev Gonick is the vice president for Information Technology Services at Case and one of Cleveland's top technological minds. He is also chairman of the board for OneCleveland, a non-profit provider of community-based ultra broadband networking services to educational, governmental, research, arts, cultural, non-profit and healthcare organizations in Greater Cleveland. It is an organization with powerful public- and private-sector partnerships. Gonick is excited about the idea of metro-wide wif-fi, but he has been a critic of how other cities have gone about chasing it. "My general criticism is that in most cases, cities -- meaning city councils -- were sort of trying to get on the bandwagon," Gonick said. "It's more of a fad. They really hadn't thought through what their priority was." Wi-Fi remains a priority in Cleveland, Gonick said, and OneCleveland will have an important announcement in April that promises to shed more light on the matter, he said. For now, suffice it to say, Gonick believes Cleveland will be better off in the long run for not jumping on the bandwagon. "The truth of the matter is there is no technology ready for metropolitan deployment -- not ready at a level Joe Citizen would be satisfied with," he said. What are available now are what are known as "mesh" networks, which are largely networks of networks not able to provide the benefit of true broadband. It's the best technology currently available, but there is better technology coming. It is why Gonick believes cities have made investments in the technology of today when the technology of tomorrow is just around the corner. Gonick has outlined a Metropolitan strategy for wireless in Cleveland that has drawn worldwide interest. The plan involves using two deployment technologies that aren't yet fully developed. When they are, speeds will be about seven times faster than the fastest broadband access available today. Gonick said those technologies are "12 to 18 months away." Northeast Ohio, he said, will be well-positioned to take advantage of them because of existing infrastructure already in place. Just because there are no local governments currently carrying Wi-Fi doesn't mean it hasn't been examined. Lake County looked into the possibility about a year and a half ago, said Paul Stefanko, director of the Lake County Telecommunications Department. Then, the cost-to-benefit ratio of Wi-Fi -- which would have been used by county departments, not the public -- didn't add up. "When we looked at it, we looked at what it's going to cost and who it's going to benefit," Stefanko said, noting that the county has transmission capabilities in place that would make wide-range Wi-Fi feasible. "We couldn't find enough applications. It just wasn't there." Right now, the public is using Wi-Fi in the traditional places -- coffee houses, libraries and schools -- and usage outside of downtown seems to be on the rise. Donna Perdzock, director of the Euclid Public Library, said usage has gone up monthly since Wi-Fi's inception there in 2004. Yours Truly Restaurants, with seven locations across Cleveland's east side, reports similar findings. Lake Hospital System has just rolled out wireless Internet access for its patients and guests. The farther away from Cleveland one travels, the fewer Wi-Fi hotspots he or she will encounter. That doesn't mean suburban and rural areas won't be included when Cleveland goes wireless. The delivery of broadband access to areas that can't get it now is a significant part of the OneCleveland plan, Gonick said, and the wireless footprint he envisions across Northeast Ohio includes impact on as many as 3 million people and numerous counties. OneCleveland has partnerships in place with corporations, but it is also very involved with public-sector entities. Gonick said OneCleveland is working with Hiram College in rural Portage County and with Lakeland Community College. Karrie Rockwell, director of sales and marketing for NeoReach, the Arizona-based firm that is supplying Tempe, Akron and Cuyahoga Falls with Wi-Fi, said there are advantages for all municipalities that are difficult to ignore. "It includes economic development," Rockwell said. "It includes city services -- your EMS, fire and police, your water meter reader guy -- all being a real-time workforce. "It allows for telecommuting. It gives businesses and residences where there might not be a lot of high-speed options one more option." There are about 32,000 wireless hotspots across the United States. About 90 percent charge a fee for Wi-Fi. The trend, however, appears to be headed in the direction of free access. Ryan MacCarthy, co-founder of MetroFreeFi.com, an online locator of free hot spots across the country, said his Web site's list of free spots has grown from 2,000 to 8,000 in 2005. Not all of the spots added to the list are new spots, he said, but the majority are. When it comes to municipal Wi-Fi, MacCarthy is a proponent of service that is free to users. "A city with abundant free Wi-Fi access has an economic edge over neighboring cities," MacCarthy said. "For example, a business lunch can be more productive in a downtown with free Wi-Fi access." San Francisco's request for proposals was intended to lead to city-wide free access, and New Orleans has also made its network free. Most other cities, though, are charging for access. In Tempe, NeoReach will directly sell service to outdoor users for $3.95 per hour or $29.95 per month, and it will also sell to other providers. Those resellers of NeoReach access have not yet announced pricing, but Rockwell said it will be cheaper than DSL or cable Internet access. Gonick's OneCleveland plan includes three tiers of bandwidth. One would be dedicated to public entities -- governments, schools, health care institutions -- one to commercial infrastructure, which would service business and consumer subscribers, and one to the public interest. That last tier, which Gonick describes as a "bicycle path" along the wide highway of bandwidth, would be free. At this stage in the game, it is difficult to ascertain what wireless access in Cleveland is going to cost the providers, let alone consumers. Despite the best hypotheses, it's also hard to say exactly how large an area the wireless cloud will cover or exactly when it will be rolled out. In the meantime, Greater Cleveland should not feel an inferiority complex when it comes to Wi-Fi, Gonick said. "There are 5,000 wireless hot spots in Cleveland," Gonick said. "It's not like we're waiting for tomorrow." Information from the Associated Press was used in this report. |