WSJ: A Second Look at Citywide Wi-Fi

• DECEMBER 8, 2008, 9:37 A.M. ET

A Second Look at Citywide Wi-Fi

Wireless networks across entire cities were launched with great promise. Too much, in fact.

By ANDREW LAVALLEE

For proponents of citywide Wi-Fi projects, this has been a tough year -- and one of fresh promise.

The idea of setting up networks to beam wireless Internet access across entire cities and towns has been touted for years as a spur to economic development. It also has been promoted as a way to help bridge the so-called digital divide -- the gap between those who have access to all the advantages of the Internet and other digital technology and those who don't, mainly because of lower income.

Progress on such networks has been halting, however, because of financial, technical and political hurdles. And over the past year or so, there have been a string of reversals. The companies that built and maintained some of the most prominent municipal Wi-Fi networks abandoned them, and other projects stalled or were scaled back.

At the same time, though, a handful of communities have applied lessons learned from the first round of failed projects and are developing Wi-Fi networks that are more realistic in their ambitions and business models.

"This was about a business model that simply didn't work," said Rolla Huff, chief executive of EarthLink Inc., after the Internet-service provider announced in May that it would stop serving the Wi-Fi network it built in Philadelphia, a project that inspired communities across the country to initiate similar efforts. "It was a great idea," said Mr. Huff. "It wasn't a great business."

 

EarthLink put itself in a financial hole from the start by setting up the network at its own expense, and then the service didn't attract enough users to offset that investment and the costs of operating the network. In the meantime, other cities followed Philadelphia's example, getting Internet-service providers to cover most or all of the cost of setting up Wi-Fi networks.

"That's where all of these cities got into trouble," says wireless consultant Craig Settles, based in Oakland, Calif. "They were trying to get the same thing for free, when it's just not financially viable."

The cost of setting up a network isn't the only problem that has plagued municipal Wi-Fi systems. Finding ways to overcome geographical and architectural barriers to signals has proved daunting in many cases. And local politics has been more of an obstacle than some providers anticipated. Negotiations between cities and providers have often bogged down in disagreements over the pricing of Wi-Fi service and where it is made available. Companies sometimes want to focus coverage on a city's business district, figuring that's where they can make the most money, but some community advocates have pushed for broader coverage and at least some free access, especially in low-income and public areas. Providers have had difficulty attracting enough advertising to support free service.

So what's different now? For starters, some cities are lowering their expectations, proposing smaller networks that can be expanded later, and they don't expect to get them free. These cities have taken a number of different approaches to the issues of coverage and pricing. For example, some have acted as anchor "tenants" -- or clients -- for the network, ensuring a stream of revenues to the provider from the start, while others have at least been more flexible about how providers can price their service. Still others have focused Wi-Fi on governmental use, treating it as a utility for police, fire and other public needs.

Here's a look at what four cities are doing, including second tries in Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Minneapolis

Municipal Wi-Fi experts often point to Minneapolis as a success story, and its anchor tenancy as an example of how other cities should financially support local wireless initiatives.

The city agreed to pay $1.3 million a year for 10 years for its employees to use a network built by USI Wireless, a unit of Minnetonka, Minn.-based US Internet Corp., for official business. Residents, meanwhile, can select from a handful of packages from USI that start at $19.95 a month, and about 10,000 currently subscribe, says Lynn Willenbring, Minneapolis's chief information officer.

About 85% to 90% of Minneapolis now has coverage, and it's aiming for 95% this fall, with no plans to provide coverage on the city's many lakes because that would require transmission poles to be placed in the water.

It hasn't been all smooth sailing, though. The city had to redirect the antennas on transmission radios hung during the winter when leaves returned to the trees around them in the spring, distorting the wireless signals. The city also is planning to spend $1 million to replace poles in some areas that aren't strong enough to support signal transmitters.

Oklahoma City

While Oklahoma City's municipal Wi-Fi network isn't yet available to residents, the city is using it to synchronize traffic lights, monitor weather conditions and provide wireless Internet access to police and firefighters. The network, which uses equipment from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Tropos Networks Inc., has been in development for several years and was unveiled in June.

The city paid about $5 million to set up the network, and the annual maintenance cost is about $200,000. But the network is paying off in unexpected ways. "We have been surprised at how much more it is actually doing" than the city expected, says Mark Meier, Oklahoma City's information technology director. For instance, the city has placed sensors on traffic lights to measure air temperature, humidity, wind and barometric pressure, and uses the Wi-Fi network to transmit the data to city officials. They can then use the data to help predict things like the likely path of a tornado, which roads are likely to freeze or in which direction a fire might spread.

Oklahoma City is targeting a 5% savings in travel time through the city because of the improved synchronization of traffic lights, which Mr. Meier expects to reduce consumer fuel costs and emissions. And an informal study among police officers revealed that Wi-Fi access allows them to spend about an hour a day more in the field, since they don't have to return to a police station to work on computers.

San Francisco

Meraki Inc., a start-up based in San Francisco, began offering free Wi-Fi access in the city earlier this year, after a previous effort by EarthLink and Google Inc. failed because of financing and political problems.

Unlike EarthLink and Google, Meraki doesn't aim to have an official relationship with the city. It has placed a limited number of transmitters around the city, free of charge, and relies on residential volunteers to put devices called repeaters on their rooftops that help spread the wireless signal. By not having to deal with city officials to set up the network, Meraki avoided bureaucratic delays, says Sanjit Biswas, the company's chief executive.

That also means that the network isn't available everywhere in the city, since it depends largely on where people have installed repeaters. "It's nothing like a citywide network," says Glenn Fleishman, editor of the Wi-Fi Net News site. Nevertheless, Meraki's San Francisco network sees more than 10,000 users a week, Mr. Biswas says, and the launch of Apple Inc.'s 3G iPhone in June has sharply increased its use.

The Meraki network isn't supported by advertising, so the company isn't making any money from it. Mr. Biswas says Meraki is using the network as a laboratory where it can test new equipment and new technologies, and as a model it can use to pitch its services to other cities. But those cities would have to pay for networks to be set up, and users would have to pay for access.

That's important for other cities to realize, no matter what provider they're dealing with, says Mr. Settles, the wireless consultant. "The rest of the world should take heed that the network is not going to be free," he says.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia's Wi-Fi ambitions were saved when an investor group created Network Acquisition Co. to take over the network in June, paying an undisclosed sum for the infrastructure in place.

While EarthLink charged residents a monthly fee for Wi-Fi access, NAC is providing it free in public areas. That spurred a surge in usage to 28,0000 unique users per weekday, says Derek Pew, NAC's chief executive. (EarthLink said it had only about 5,000 subscribers for the network in May.)

But NAC is focused on developing the network as a business, says Rick Rasansky, a member of NAC's board of directors, with companies and other organizations paying to use the network. The free service, he says, "is a byproduct of our commercial services. Our ability to advance digital inclusion in the Philadelphia region -- that's obviously something that we'd all like to do. But at the same time we have to have a profitable business to support that."

—Mr. LaVallee is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's New York bureau.

Write to Andrew LaVallee at andrew.lavallee@wsj.com

 

Bill Gates Urges Obama to Increase Spending

Bill Gates Urges Obama to Increase Spending
	Dec 4, 2008	Washington Post
	By Philip Rucker The world's richest technology entrepreneur -- and leading philanthropist -- came to Washington yesterday with a simple message for President-elect Barack Obama: Increase spending. Against the backdrop of a recession, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said the federal government must increase deficit spending to stimulate the economy and help the country's most vulnerable residents. Gates said new investments are critical to building on recent improvements in U.S. public education and fighting disease abroad, which he said could be reversed if spending dries up. Gates, who has used his fortune to build the world's largest foundation, redefining the meaning of mega-philanthropist, said his foundation will increase the amount of its grants next year, despite declines in its $35 billion endowment caused by the sagging economy. He called on Obama to follow through on his campaign commitment to double U.S. foreign assistance to $50 billion by the end of his first term. "In a crisis, there is always a risk that you take your eyes off the future and you sacrifice long-term investments for short-term gains," Gates said in a speech at George Washington University. "You have to seek both. . . . We should have a bigger goal than getting the economy growing again. I think we should expand the number of people who are contributing to the economy and benefiting from it." Gates described the financial crisis as an opportunity for innovation, likening it to the economic woes of the 1970s, which gave rise to America's information technology boom, during which Microsoft was born. "Difficult times can launch great ideas," he said. Later, in a broad interview with The Washington Post, Gates also lamented the state of the District's struggling public schools, which have received hundreds of millions of dollars from his foundation, but had high praise for efforts by Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. Gates's foundation funds charter schools, scholarships and other programs for the city's poorest students. "It's a very hard job, and whether it's the facilities or the personnel issues, somebody had to come in and really point out that the students are not getting what they deserve," he said of Rhee. "The irony [is] that it's almost the highest spending per pupil in the country, and it's almost the worst set of outcomes of students in the country -- and this is the nation's capital. You'd think that in terms of effective spending of dollars and outcomes, that D.C. would be a model city, and, in fact, it has been the exact opposite." As much as the Gates Foundation invests in U.S. education -- its grants last year totaled more than $400 million -- the investments pale in comparison with government spending. The foundation's entire endowment, for instance, would not be enough to fund public schools in California for a single year. Gates also uses his star power to draw attention to what he considers priorities. Just one week after last month's election, Gates summoned some education policy heavyweights -- Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, New York schools chief Joel I. Klein, Rhee and leaders of Obama's transition team -- to Seattle, where he unveiled his foundation's new approach to education, which includes new investments in community colleges. Gates stepped down this summer from Microsoft, the technology company he grew into a behemoth, to work full time on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose endowment receives more than a billion dollars each year from investor Warren Buffett's fortune. At 53, Gates is pioneering a new approach to philanthropy, applying the risk-taking and results-based philosophy of an entrepreneur to solving some of the world's most chronic problems. In the interview, Gates likened his role at the foundation to running Microsoft. "How do you find the smartest people, and how do you create teams around them where they've got the right set of skills? How do you take on things where you're going to have failures and learn from those failures, be willing to do things that are risky, some of which will end up being a complete dead end, and have a set of outcomes: lives saved." The foundation is akin to a start-up. "It's like a large company with a big vision and a determination to grow rapidly," said Duke University professor Joel L. Fleishman, who studies philanthropy. "But in this case, it's not growing to make money. It's growing to figure out how to give away money in an orderly and effective fashion." Philanthropic leaders have looked upon the foundation's rise with awe. "It's the largest in the world by a factor of two, and that's astonishing," said Harvey P. Dale, a nonprofit law professor at New York University. But, he said, some leaders "are jealous of it, some feel threatened by it, including some of the foundations who were hugely dominant and now, by comparison, are relatively modest." But many other philanthropists try to emulate Gates. "When you're as large as Gates, the market moves when you move," said Larry Brilliant, a health expert who directs Google's giving. "Great public health accomplishments on a global scale require prescience. They require resources. They require scientific and managerial excellence, and maybe most importantly, they require leadership and public will," Brilliant said. "This is something only Gates can do." It is too soon to determine whether Gates's work will have a lasting impact, experts said. "The jury is definitely still out," said Fleishman, who has written a history of foundations. "They're going about things in the right way, but it is still too early to say that they have had an unqualified success. . . . The problems are just so big." Asked what his legacy may be in 15 years, Gates said he hopes it would be as a catalyst for "dramatic improvement in global health. . . . I expect that we would have played a role in a dramatic reduction in disease in many of the top areas: malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, childhood diseases."

The Longest Recession Since .

The Longest Recession Since …

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/the-longest-recession-since/

 

By David Leonhardt

By now, everyone has heard that the current financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. Is this also going to turn out to be the longest recession since the Depression?

The National Bureau of Economic Research — the widely acknowledged arbiter of recessions — announced today that a recession began in December 2007. That means the downturn is now a year old, and no one thinks it’s on the verge of ending.

Here are the longest recessions of the last century:

1929-33: 43 months
1910-12: 24 months
1913-14: 23 months
1920-21: 18 months
1973-75: 16 months
1980-81: 16 months

Economists have been forecasting that the current recession will likely end sometime in the spring (which is, presumably, when some of the new stimulus money will start to be spent). If they’re right, this recession will be roughly as long as the 1973-75 recession and the 1980-81 recession, both of which were 16 months. To find a longer one than that, you have to go back to the Depression.

Remember, too, that forecasters have been far too optimistic over the past year. At some point, that will change. But for now, the best bet seems to be that this recession will last for more than 16 months.

Run to the explosion in Mumbai

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/opinion/29mehta.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=suketu%20mehta&st=cse

 

New York Times

 

November 29, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
What They Hate About Mumbai
By SUKETU MEHTA

 

MY bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There’s something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.

 

Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird.

 

Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India, symbols of the city that gives the industry its name. It is no wonder that one of the first things the Taliban did upon entering Kabul was to shut down the Bollywood video rental stores. The Taliban also banned, wouldn’t you know it, the keeping of songbirds.

 

Bollywood dream-makers are shaken. “I am ashamed to say this,” Amitabh Bachchan, superstar of a hundred action movies, wrote on his blog. “As the events of the terror attack unfolded in front of me, I did something for the first time and one that I had hoped never ever to be in a situation to do. Before retiring for the night, I pulled out my licensed .32 revolver, loaded it and put it under my pillow.”

 

Mumbai is a “soft target,” the terrorism analysts say. Anybody can walk into the hotels, the hospitals, the train stations, and start spraying with a machine gun. Where are the metal detectors, the random bag checks? In Mumbai, it’s impossible to control the crowd. In other cities, if there’s an explosion, people run away from it. In Mumbai, people run toward it — to help. Greater Mumbai takes in a million new residents a year. This is the problem, say the nativists. The city is just too hospitable. You let them in, and they break your heart.

 

In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today’s Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.

 

And now it looks as if the latest terrorists were our neighbors, young men dressed not in Afghan tunics but in blue jeans and designer T-shirts. Being South Asian, they would have grown up watching the painted lady that is Mumbai in the movies: a city of flashy cars and flashier women. A pleasure-loving city, a sensual city. Everything that preachers of every religion thunder against. It is, as a monk of the pacifist Jain religion explained to me, “paap-ni-bhoomi”: the sinful land.

 

In 1993, Hindu mobs burned people alive in the streets — for the crime of being Muslim in Mumbai. Now these young Muslim men murdered people in front of their families — for the crime of visiting Mumbai. They attacked the luxury businessmen’s hotels. They attacked the open-air Cafe Leopold, where backpackers of the world refresh themselves with cheap beer out of three-foot-high towers before heading out into India. Their drunken revelry, their shameless flirting, must have offended the righteous believers in the jihad. They attacked the train station everyone calls V.T., the terminus for runaways and dreamers from all across India. And in the attack on the Chabad house, for the first time ever, it became dangerous to be Jewish in India.

 

The terrorists’ message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will get killed. Cricket matches with visiting English and Australian teams have been shelved. Japanese and Western companies have closed their Mumbai offices and prohibited their employees from visiting the city. Tour groups are canceling long-planned trips.

 

But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God’s name but in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance; work hard and party harder.

 

If the rest of the world wants to help, it should run toward the explosion. It should fly to Mumbai, and spend money. Where else are you going to be safe? New York? London? Madrid?

 

So I’m booking flights to Mumbai. I’m going to go get a beer at the Leopold, stroll over to the Taj for samosas at the Sea Lounge, and watch a Bollywood movie at the Metro. Stimulus doesn’t have to be just economic.

 

Suketu Mehta, a professor of journalism at New York University, is the author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.”