(Second in a series)

The recent spate of negative publicity for municipal Wi-Fi projects comes, somewhat ironically, as the industry is settling into what seems to be a more rational period of deployment based on solid business cases. That publicity is linked to the well-publicized decisions by a couple of cities—Anchorage, Alaska, and Corona, Calif.—to pull out of planning Wi-Fi networks, as well as reports that usage in other cities—including Lompoc, Calif.—has been much less than expected, threatening the revenues needed to pay for the infrastructure.

As mentioned in the first part of this series, two recent studies have urged cities to proceed with caution and not assume that advertising revenues from widespread consumer usage will be enough to pay for a wireless infrastructure.

In fact, the most successful Wi-Fi deployments today have been by municipalities who did more thorough planning and knew more about what to expect going in, said Craig Settles, president of Successful.com and author of one of the reports.

“Wi-Fi is working in the areas where they did thorough needs assessment, aligning the technology with the needs of the end user,” Settles said. “Whether the network was for the government, for economic development or for general purpose, the first step was clearly defining where the needs were going to be and the paybacks.”

Increasingly, the industry is moving toward an anchor tenancy model, where the municipality or county buys service for a variety of public uses and helps fund the network buildout in the process. The service provider, or the municipality itself, can then offer high-speed Internet access as an ad-supported free service, a subscription service or a subsidized service to low-income areas.

“We have always focused on real user groups, a real return on investment and real defined applications,” said Chip Yager, director of operations for Motorola’s mesh network product group. “These types of things weren’t tied to selling public access; these were things that made cities run better and more efficiently and had a defined return on investment. Even now that we are in the Wi-Fi arena with our mesh products, we are still focusing with every city on sitting down ahead of time and getting them to understand what the use cases are.”

Public safety is a major user of muni WiFi networks, he said, and there are numerous applications. “That can involve alleviating traffic congestion, managing parking facilities better, monitoring high crime areas so you can lower the crime rate by public surveillance and let the police force respond better and more efficiently to what is actually happening,” Yager said.

By using wireless networks as the backhaul for video cameras that provide the remote video picture, cities can not only avoid the cost of digging streets to provide fiber optics, but also respond very quickly to immediate threats such as bulking up airport surveillance when terrorism alerts are issued, he added. Using 802.11e capability as part of a multimesh dual-line system, Motorola will enable the system to recognize video data packets and give them priority, Yager added, and software systems available today can even read the video to provide alerts.

“These applications can not only recognize when something is left behind, like a suitcase that might contain a bomb, but when something is taken,” he said. “If an area is empty, when someone crosses through at a time when no one is supposed to be there—it might only be there for a second—the analysis applications would pick that up, they would record it, bring it to the attention of security personnel, show them the video and let them react to it as appropriate.”

Plano, Texas, is using a Motorola MotoMesh Quattro system today that provides standard Wi-Fi but also public safety in the 4.9 MHz band, Yager said.

AT&T is providing Riverside, Calif., with a dual-band system that provides public safety in the 4.9 MHz band and Wi-Fi at 2.4 MHz as well, as the city is the anchor tenant of that system.

In Corpus Christi, Texas, the city has partnered with EarthLink to sell excess capacity on the Wi-Fi network it deployed for public safety and other municipal applications, said Cole Reinwand, vice president of product strategy and marketing for EarthLink Municipal Networks.

“Meter reading is becoming pretty popular with cities that operate their own utilities,” he added. “Intelligent traffic management systems can make the lights turn more efficiently, which lets buses run on time. A lot of cities are excited about the prospect of ubiquitous high-speed access, but there haven’t been that many applications to use that.”

But anchor tenancy isn’t the only model that is working.

In Philadelphia, the city set out, through non-profit organization Wireless Philadelphia, to use wireless for digital inclusion, Reinwand adds. But that project was also carefully planned, and it included getting refurbished computers for low-income residents at a low cost and providing computer training as well.

“They had a singleness of purpose,” Settles said. “They started the project to address economic development issues, and they have stayed focused fairly close to that. They are putting all the steps into place that can make for a successful application.”

Seattle did much the same thing, he said, by using wireless in pilot projects in redevelopment zones targeted by the city. “They are moving general consumers in that area by promoting it, and they are setting up relationships and programs with businesses to get them on board with portals of content,” he said. “There is a lot of necessary step-building that is consistent with an economic development goal.”

In Tempe, Ariz., the city made a deal with Strix Systems to get up to 2000 free accounts in trade for providing the mounting assets and power for Strix to deploy its multiradio nodes, said Martin Levetin, vice president of carrier and municipal networks.

“Subscribers buy the service,” he said. “There are a lot of people who show up in the winter to play golf, and there are 10,000 students at [Arizona State University], so there is a lot of student use. It is a fairly well-to-do population that would rather use wireless.”

What industry leaders agree on, despite the differences in successful deployments, is that they were all carefully planned. The ongoing challenge to municipalities before deploying wireless is to know what they want the network to accomplish and to make sure they are deploying the network their applications will require.

“There is a shared interest in getting this network deployed, and there is a defined user group,” Motorola’s Yager said. “It can lend itself to so many uses, but if you don’t think through up front what you want to do with it, you may find it doesn’t support what you want to do later on.”

That doesn’t mean cities need to jump into extensive and expensive applications at the outset, Settles said. “The cities that succeed tend to start with one, two, maybe three types of applications and build on top of that,” he said. “Even though you have a master plan of where you want to go, start with the first one or two applications to get something out there, but make sure you have your ducks in a row from a design standpoint. It’s easier for people to get their hands around one or two things and not get overwhelmed by the process of doing everything at once.”

Most of those involved in helping cities build these networks believe municipal Wi-Fi is here to stay and will survive the current bumps.

“There is no question this is something municipalities want for a whole host of reasons,” Levetin said. “They are getting over the fact there is no free lunch, and they will have to contribute something to get this infrastructure. The business economics are different. They thought they could get away with less dense devices, and they thought they could pay for the whole thing out of advertising, and it’s just not going to work out that way.”

Related Headlines

Part 1: Being cautious with muni Wi-Fi

Part 3: The limitations of muni Wi-Fi