Testimony to the New York City Council Committees on Parks and Recreation and Technology

Members and Staff of the New York City Council, I would like to thank you for inviting me here today to provide my testimony and provide what I hope is useful guidance on the issue of Public Space Wi-Fi Hotspots and the Parks Wi-Fi Deployment plan developed by DoITT in the course of negotiating NYC cable franchise agreements.

First, a brief introduction (since we as an organization have testified a number of times for the NY City Council and many know us): NYCwireless is a non-profit whose mission is to bring free Wi-Fi Internet access to New York City parks, public spaces, and other public gathering places, as well as under-served places like affordable housing residences. We have been doing this work since 2000. We were the organization that brought free Wi-Fi to New York City, starting with a locally supported hotspot in Tomkins Square Park in 2001, the world-recognized Bryant Park hotspot in 2003, and the Downtown Alliance’s groundbreaking network of hotspots in 2005. We have been doing this work longer than any other organization and have seen more success than anyone else in New York City in our efforts. We continue to create new hotspots around New York City, and innovate the technology that enables the creation of these hotspots that bring significant recognition to us and New York.

We are a special type of IT organization: we provide services and support for planning, installing, and maintaining a hotspot or hotzone, but we rely on our partners to supply funding and local outreach and marketing, as well as support for accessing local infrastructure for places to install hotspot equipment. Working with us, a local organization can retain ownership and responsibility for a hotspot, but can take advantage of our experience and best practices, and can depend upon our technical and procedural expertise to create a successful hotspot quickly and cheaply. We are also a local small business that is independently funded by our work, and represent exactly the sort of local organization the City should be supporting in these hard economic times.

We have long been a supporter of the intent of the Parks Department, and more recently DoITT, to bring more free Wi-Fi hotspots to city parks, but for the benefit of the citizens of this city, we have also been outspoken critics of the policies and practices of the Parks Department and DoITT in their effort. I have brought copies of some blog articles and past testimony with me today, so I won’t detail the many issues we have spoken about in the past, but concentrate on the specific issues at hand today.

Related NYCwireless Filings and Blog Posts

• http://www.nycwireless.net/2009/06/response-to-city-wireless-internet-access-for-new-york-city-parks-and-other-open-spaces-doitt-rfi/
• http://www.nycwireless.net/2007/12/testimony-to-the-new-york-city-broadband-advisory-committee/
• http://www.nycwireless.net/2009/05/our-take-nyc-rfi-on-city-wireless-internet-access-for-new-york-city-parks-and-other-open-spaces/
• http://www.nycwireless.net/2010/09/details-on-nyc-cable-franchise-agreements-with-subscriber-wi-fi-details/
• http://www.nycwireless.net/2010/09/ny-cable-firms-provide-limited-park-wi-fi-as-part-of-franchise-renewal/

Park Hotspot Best Practices

We have discovered, in over a decade of work, that successful and sustainable hotspots require a four things:

1. A motivated local organization that sees the creation of a hotspot or hotzone as a valuable economic and cultural development for its community,
2. Promotion and marketing to inform local communities of the hotspot’s existence and value,
3. Well executed and maintained hardware and network installation, and
4. Appropriate management systems and software to protect the users of the hotspots and the organizations that build them

NYCwireless provides components (3) and (4), while our partner organizations (BIDs, “friends of” organizations, local businesses and developers, etc.) provide components (1) and (1).

Indeed, we have found that (1) may in fact be the most important component of a successful and sustainable hotspot; That all currently operating hotspots are projects of local BIDs and other organizations, while the City’s Park hotspots saw only a 3-year life and are now no longer operating should be proof enough of this. An inability of the City Parks Department and DoITT to recognizing these facts has long been a deficiency of these organization’s efforts.

I’m not going to speak today about the value of such hotspots to a local community, as this fact has been established and documented extensively in prior NYCwireless testimony to the City Council and to the NYC Broadband Advisory Committee, some of which I have brought with me should the Council wish to review. I am also not going to speak today about what we believe is the appropriate and sustainable model for NYC to support the creation of many more public space Free Wi-Fi Hotspots. This model is clearly documented in NYCwireless’ RFI response to DoITT’s “City Wireless Internet Access for New York City Parks and Other Open Spaces,” copies of which I have also brought with me for your review.

How Hotspots Work

At this point, it is useful to briefly describe how public hotspots work, and the hardware and software that comprise them.

First, in terms of process and definition: a “public hotspot” is any multi-user Wi-Fi network whose purpose is to legitimately invite passers-by or visitors to connect in order to gain access (likely after some authentication process) to the internet. Starbucks’ Wi-Fi networks in their stores (operated by AT&T Wireless) are public hotspots, Boingo (a company) Wi-Fi networks in airport terminals and hotels are hotspots, and NYCwireless Wi-Fi in Parks are hotspots. Business networks, though they may utilize Wi-Fi technology, are not hotspots, nor are personal home networks that are unprotected by security measures and encryption.

“Free public hotspots” are any “public hotspots” that are further made available to all users at no cost to that user for any period of time. Recently, Starbucks’ hotspots were made into Free public hotspots, allowing store visitors to connect to the internet for free for unlimited amounts of time. NYCwireless Hotspots, DTA hotspots, and the hotspot at Bryant Park are “Free public hotspots” since a visitor to any of our park networks never pays any money for any period of usage. Wi-Fi service on Virgin America and other airlines is not a Free public hotspot since AirCell (the company that operates the networks) requires a payment of $10-$13 per flight for usage. The proposed DoITT franchise agreement park hotspots are also not Free public hotspot in any sense since they require payment of a daily fee for usage beyond three 10 minute sessions per month (more on this later).

To use a hotspot, a user must select the network name in their computer’s Wi-Fi network selection panel. In the case of NYCwireless hotspots, the user selects the network named “www.nycwireless.net”. Once connected to the hotspot, the user must browse to any web page in order to bring up the login screen. The login screen (also known as the hotspot splash page or hotspot home page) is customized for each hotspot, and contains information about the hotspot creator (in NYCwireless’ case the BID or other local organization partner) and any sponsor logos and messages. A user can create a new account, read the Acceptable Usage Policy, or just log into the hotspot with their email address and password. Once logged in, the user is then redirected to another customized hotspot page with more information about the hotspot. At this point, the user is logged into the hotspot, and can access the internet as he or she sees fit. All hotspots work in exactly the same way.

NYCwireless uses server-based software to operate and maintain all of its hotspots. This software handles user login, the presentation of all customized hotspot home pages, and captures all usage information, including real-time information about who is logged in, how much bandwidth each user is using, and how many visitors each hotspot receives.

NYCwireless Hotspot Network Usage Statistics

The NYCwireless network of hotspots has over 40,000 registered users, over 15,000 of which have logged in over the past year. The most active months of the year are in the summer (understandably, since we mostly operate outdoor hotspots), however winter usage is about 40% of the summer peak, thus showing that, except for the most inclement weather, free public hotspots are popular year round.

Our most active hotspots are Madison Square Park (11,143 visitors in 2010), Jackson Square Park (3,041 visitors in 2010), Wagner Park (2,191 visitors in 2010) and Brooklyn Bridge Park (983 visitors in 2010). They visit at all hours of the day with a peak in the early afternoon, though late evenings see about 50% of the usage as during the day, and early morning about 20% of early afternoon peak.

Compare this to our affordable housing hotspot network, built with partner Community Access. The hotspots in 9 Community Access managed buildings saw almost 40,000 visits over the past couple of years and have over 7,000 registered users (some of these are duplicates that are in use by the same person). These hotspots, which are available throughout the buildings, get 24/7/365 use, and are now peaking at over 1,700 connections per month. These networks also saw about 17TB worth of information transferred over the past year, which shows enormous usage.

DoITT’s Cable Franchise Agreements

I do wish to make a few brief comments about the current DoITT plan to use cable franchise agreements to bring “Wi-Fi” to City Parks. These comments are discussed more extensively in our blog, and I have brought copies of a few appropriate articles with me as well.

On a positive note, DoITT’s attempt to use the negotiation of cable franchise agreements to do something beneficial for park Wi-Fi is laudable. I was very happy to see that they are at least paying a little attention to the extensively researched and assembled (though unreleased) Diamond Consulting “Broadband Needs Assessment Study.”

However, the positive aspects of DoITT’s plan end there.

First, the plan does not establish any form of “Free Public Wi-Fi”, an amenity of New York City parks since NYCwireless began our work, and one replicated by the Parks Department and many other organizations around the City. Free Public Wi-Fi Hotspots were a very significant recommendation of the Diamond Consulting “Broadband Needs Assessment Study,” and the “Free” part of these public hotspots are exactly the part of these amenities that make them so valuable and essential for local residents.

Make no mistake: DoITT’s plan establishes a $1 per day fee for internet service in parks. There may be a few free 10-minute blocks per month, and there may be ways to hide the $1 per day charge in a resident’s cable service internet bill, but with DoITT’s plan, NYC won’t have Free Wi-Fi. We’ll have $1 per day Wi-Fi, delivered to public spaces that are maintained by our tax dollars, paid to a couple of huge private corporations.

In fact, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable stand to make tens of millions of dollars per year providing this service. Central Park gets about 25m visitors per year, and if we ignore all other parks, and figure that fewer than half of those visitors buy one day of internet service per year, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision get paid $0.99 x 10 million visitors = $10,000,000.

Second, the industry standard for gaining access to such types of subscription service as are contemplated by DoITT and the cable companies requires that a prospective user of a fee-based Parks Hotspot will need to create an account and enter their billing information. This requires the submission of identity, address, and credit card information into a web form prior to gaining access to the hotspot. Essentially, by promoting this solution, DoITT is pushing NYC citizens and visitors to hand over deeply personal and secure information to a private organization over which neither the user nor DoITT has any control.

Contrast this to the way that NYCwireless offers free Wi-Fi to citizens: we do require registration of a user account so that we can track agreement to our Acceptable Usage Policy. However we require only a valid email address. No billing address, no credit card, no other identity information.

Personally, I am fearful of handing over such information to such private organizations, though I have in the past. But I am more fearful for the harm that will be done to those that depend more significantly upon Park Hotspots. How many city residents don’t have a credit card? How many children in playgrounds who couldn’t get a credit card even if they wanted to? Adults? How many city residents live in neighborhoods that are otherwise safe, but in which they would prefer not pulling out their wallet and a credit card just to get what should be Free Internet Access? How many city residents depend upon Free Wi-Fi because they live below the poverty line, and because they can’t afford or don’t want cable internet, cannot afford the $5 it would cost them to get internet access in a city park during the week?

Lastly, because of DoITT’s “whole package solution”, most NYC residents and visitors won’t see any Wi-Fi, for free or for fee, for years, since local organizations that would otherwise have sponsored the creation of a Free Public Wi-Fi Hotspot say “oh, well, the city is going to do this someday, so we won’t bother doing this now for our community.” If past experience is any predictor of future performance, it will be years before the first Paid Wi-Fi Hotspot is opened, and many more before many others are opened, if at all. Meanwhile, DoITT’s actions will have stopped in its tracks any plans for more hotspots that local organizations may be contemplating.

An Alternative Plan

For all these problems with DoITT’s plans, and these are just a few of the big ones, there does seem to be a reformulation of the cable franchise plan that would address the issues, and lead us to a more sustainable future with many more Free Public Wi-Fi Hotspots in NYC parks and public spaces.

We have presented in past testimony and our DoITT RFI response that there are three ways that that the City can support and foster the creation of more Free Wi-Fi Hotspots:

1. Provide or coordinate a source of funding that local organizations like BIDs can draw from to create Hotspots
2. Ensure that ISPs provide internet access services (at a competitive price) to which Hotspots can connect
3. Offer free access to park infrastructure, including buildings, electrical connections, and lamp posts for the installation of hotspot hardware

All three of these means of support can be accommodated through small adjustments to DoITT’s cable franchise agreements.

Funding

The cable franchise agreement establish a $10 million funding resource (provided in part via in-kind services) that the cable franchisees will spend to create hotspots in a few dozen parks. Instead, this funding resource should be allocated to the use of local organizations who can apply for funding (it costs about $10,000-$15,000 over 3 years to establish a hotspot in a medium sized park). The local organizations, such as BIDs, can use those funds to hire outside contractors, including, but not exclusively, NYCwireless, to build, operate, and maintain park and public space hotspots.

Internet Service

The cable franchise agreement implicitly establishes the allocation of internet access service to any park where a hotspot is created by a cable company. Instead, the internet access service that would have been used by a cable company’s own hotspot should be made available for free (or at least at cost) for any local organization to use in any park or public space to provide internet access to a created hotspot.

Park Infrastructure

The cable franchise agreement also implicitly establishes the availability of parks-based building and lamp-post infrastructure that would be used to house hotspot hardware for the cable companies. Instead, such building and lamp post infrastructure, plus any available electrical infrastructure (hotspots generally need the equivalent of 1-2 100 Watt light bulbs of power) should be made available to any local organization to use to house equipment for a hotspot.

We are hopeful that the NY City Council can establish guidelines and direction for both the Parks Department and DoITT in bringing more Free Wi-Fi Hotspots to New York City, for the benefit of residents and visitors.

Please be advised that the Committee on Technology jointly with the Committee on Parks and Recreation will hold a hearing on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 11:00 a.m. in the 16th Floor Committee Room, 250 Broadway, New York, NY regarding the above-referred topic.

You are hereby invited to attend this hearing and testify therein.  Please feel free to bring with you such members of your staff you deem appropriate to the subject matter.

If you plan to participate, it would be greatly appreciated if you could bring twenty (20) copies double-sided of your written testimony to the hearing.  Due to increased building security procedures, please bring identification & allot some extra time for entry through the building lobby.

I would appreciate receiving a response from you as to whether or not you will be able to attend. Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Gary Altman
Legislative Counsel

We don’t have all the details yet, but according to the NY Daily News, NYC residents and visitors can sign up for 3 10-minute sessions per month of Wi-Fi internet access in parks. This isn’t Free Wi-Fi, like NYCwireless, the Downtown Alliance, and others provide, since you need to pay $0.99/day after you use up your 10-minute sessions.

As a tax-paying resident of NYC, I’m personally offended that DoITT would allow a CableCo to make money off of our tax-funded parks. TWC had revenue of $17.9 billion in 2009, and they are paying part of $10 million to light up NYC parks. That’s less than 0.05% of their revenue. Meanwhile, they stand to make $10′s of millions of dollars per year providing this service. (Central Park gets about 25m visitors per year, and if we ignore all other parks, and figure that fewer than half of those visitors buy one day of internet service, we get $0.99 x 10 million visitors = $10m.)

This seems to be DoITT selling out NYC residents and tax-payers. And we shouldn’t be surprised considering how DoITT and the NYC government have been in the telco’s/cableco’s back pocket for years.

A few more notes:

1. If its not 24/7 Free, its not Free Wi-Fi. Period. This is clearly not “Free Wi-Fi” but rather government sanctioned subscription Wi-Fi.
2. That DoITT released this on primary day was a clear attempt to bury this news because it knew it was doing wrong by residents of NYC.
3. The previous Park Wi-Fi program with WiFiSalon drove that company out of business. See our post: Wi-Fi Salon Shuts Down
4. What happened to DoITT’s plan to offer a more open and sustainable park Wi-Fi program? They put out an RFI last year (http://www.nyc.gov/html/doitt/html/miscs/rfiwifi.shtml), and we (NYCwireless) had quite a lot to say about it (see Response to City Wireless Internet Access for New York City Parks and Other Open Spaces (DoITT RFI) and Our Take: NYC RFI on “City Wireless Internet Access for New York City Parks and Other Open Spaces”). But at least they were trying to ask the right questions…
5. And what of security and privacy issues? Isn’t this deal like the city saying that we all should be giving our personal and billing information to TWC and Cablevision? What sort of protection has the city negotiated on our behalf?

Only time will tell if DoITT and the NYC Government decide to take the correct path and release an RFP for Free Park Wi-Fi as they indicated they would last year. If they don’t, we’re going to continue to see failure and lack of leadership from the NYC Park Wi-Fi program.

But fear not, NYCwireless will still be here and we’ll still be providing real Free Wi-Fi to all city residents and visitors.

Friend Bruce Lincoln, Entrepreneur in Residence at Columbia Engineering’s Center for Technology, Innovation & Community Engagement, sent us an invite for a Community Broadband Hearing taking place next Friday, December 11 at Columbia. I’m planning to attend, and suggest those of you that fill the different roles outlined below attend as well.

If you are planning on attending, leave a comment so we can find you!

It is important that members of the local community have an opportunity to participate in the National Broadband Planning process which is currently underway in Washington.

Toward that end, I invite you to participate in an FCC Field Hearing on Friday, December 11, 2009 at Columbia University in New York. The meeting will be held in Davis Auditorium from 8:45 am until noon.

The field hearing will bring together policymakers, elected officials, not-for-profit organizations, small businesses, anchor institutions, public agencies, broadband providers, foundations, community-based organizations and community leaders, academicians, and researchers. Together we will share thoughts on how collectively we can ensure all New Yorkers have access to broadband and the educational, economic and social opportunities it can provide.

I hope you will be able to attend as a representative of your organization or constituency. To fully understand the importance of broadband access from all points of view, your participation is vital. The agenda includes a “community visioning session” where you will have an opportunity to share your thoughts, ideas, and concerns with the group.

You can confirm your attendance via e-mail to bl2317@columbia.edu.

Agenda

Friday, December 11, 2009
Davis Auditorium, Columbia University
8 am-noon

Download PDF Version

RFI Response to City Wireless Internet Access for New York City Parks and Other Open Spaces

Prepared by:

Dana Spiegel, Executive Director, NYCwireless
Rob Kelley and Anthony Townsend, Executive Board Members

Overview

NYCwireless is a non-profit organization that advocates and enables the growth of free, public wireless internet access in New York City and surrounding areas. Founded in 2001, NYCwireless serves thousands of individuals throughout the New York City metro area through the dozens of hotspots installed in NYC Parks, Public Spaces, and Affordable Housing Buildings.

Over the past several years, NYCwireless has built free, public wireless networks in dozens of New York City parks and open spaces through partnerships with local organizations such as the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation and Madison Square Park Conservancy and business improvement districts such as the Alliance for Downtown New York. These include hotspots in Bryant Park, Madison Square Park, Wagner Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Jackson Square Park, Stuyvesant Cove Park (the first fully solar powered hotspot in New York), Tompkins Square Park, Bowling Green Park, City Hall Park, the South Street Seaport, the Winter Garden, the Atrium at 60 Wall Street, Stone Street, Wall Street Park, and the Vietnam Veterans Plaza, among others.

NYCwireless also assists under-served communities in getting affordable internet access. NYCwireless works with Dunn Development Corporation and Community Access, a non-profit housing organization, to train volunteers and building residents to build and maintain wireless networks in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The networks provide 8 buildings with more than 50 residents per building with private, high-speed wireless connections.

According to a survey by NYCwireless Board Member Laura Forlano, Wi-Fi is a factor in attracting people to specific locations throughout the city for 70% of those surveyed. These findings have potential implications for economic development and support the rationale that WiFi may enable commerce and productivity that would not have occurred otherwise. For example, one respondent commutes 20 minutes from Queens to use the Bryant Park wireless network on weekends in order to work on his food and wine website outside rather than at home.

At NYCwireless, we’ve worked with many local leaders. Some of them are BIDs like the Downtown Alliance or public benefit corporations like the Battery Park City Authority. Some are local developers, like the one we’re working with in the West Village who transformed a park and part of a neighborhood from being a place for homeless people to being a place for families and children. These local leaders have transformed their communities, and helped us bring internet to the people. Unfortunately so many more come to us with visions of helping out their neighborhood, but don’t have the funds to make it happen. While NYCwireless provides a very low cost option for building public Wi-Fi, its not without installation and maintenance cost. And many of the local leaders we’ve spoken to have no current means to get the funding they need to build and create local broadband. In speaking with them, we know that with just enough funding, these people too could change their communities, and bring whole neighborhoods online. Funding must be injected into local communities in order to provide resources for these leaders to do their work.

How NYCwireless Works

Free public internet access in parks begins with NYCwireless seeking local interest and support. We work with local organizations, such as BIDs–like the Alliance for Downtown New York–and “Friends of…” groups, that approach our organization seeking help. Once locations are identified, we assist with the design of the wireless equipment deployment plan and seeking funding to support their build-out. NYCwireless provides design, installation, and support for the networks that we build through infrastructure, volunteer help, and the extensive know-how that we have developed over the past nine years.

The equipment that we use is open source and standards based, to ensure maximum compatibility with end-user equipment, including laptops, PDAs, and more recently iPhones and wireless VOIP phones. As a result, we ensure that both industry standard and novel uses of our networks are unrestricted, allowing residents, students and artists to invent new technologies and uses for public wireless networks.

Our hotspots are built using hardware from Metrix Communication LLC. The hotspots are mounted in a weatherproof metal case measuring approximately 6″ x 8″ x 3.5″, and utilize 802.11b/g mini-pci network cards. Two 70° sector antennas, measuring approximately 2 x 4.5 x 4.5 inches, are usually connected to the hotspot via low loss LMR cabling. Outdoor rated ethernet cabling connects the hotspot to the DSL modem or other internet access line, which is mounted inside of the building. Power is supplied to the hotspot utilizing Power Over Ethernet (POE) to minimize the indoor/outdoor cabling.

Our hotspots have generally been deployed outside of park grounds and public facilities, or in the case of Bryant Park, using facilities provided by the licensed private park operator. We generally mount our equipment atop or on local buildings with the support of our partner organizations, beaming the wireless signal into the park. This deployment strategy is sometimes ideal, since equipment can be installed quickly and there are sometimes no facilities within the park to support the mounting of equipment.

We can often deploy a hotspot for only a few thousand dollars, and in under two months, to service most or all of a park. Much of this time is spent designing the network, ordering equipment and DSL internet service, and gathering necessary agreements. Actual equipment installation can take 1-2 days.

Broadband Service Availability

Access to city-owned property isn’t the biggest issue in getting Wi-Fi deployed. Getting reasonably fast internet access lines (or WiMax uplinks) is the biggest problem. NYCwireless has had tremendous success rapidly deploying Wi-Fi equipment on building rooftops and even nearby businesses, but we (and WiFiSalon as well) have spent countless, fruitless hours getting internet lines from Verizon. In a recent example, it took over 4 months to get internet service to Wagner Park, even though our gear was installed within a month of signing a contract.

Ideally, the City would provide assistance facilitating the installation of internet access lines. This would include:

• Ensuring that ISPs, including Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Cablevision, provide connectivity in a nondiscriminatory and timely manner
• Ensuring that ISPs provide connectivity for reasonable rates comparable to the rates normal businesses are charged
• Ensuring that when an ISP claims to “not know” about a particular address, even though that address is within the city limits and contains an actual physical building structure, that the ISP is required to fix/update their database with valid information and expedite the installation of an internet access line if a phone line already exists

Sustainable Business Model

DoITT is potentially open to other business models for building Wi-Fi hotspots, though as experience in NYC and many other cities has shown, there aren’t any viable ones where businesses can independently fund the buildout and maintenance.

DoITT seems mostly steadfast in their insistence (as the Parks Department has been in the past) that no City funds should be spent on any buildout or maintenance of hotspots. This is still a really big sticking point: The first Parks RFP required that a concessionaire pay significant money to the Parks department, and the second Parks RFP required that a concessionaire pay some proposed amount of money to the Parks department.

There have been only a handful of interested companies (we offered to pay $1), and WiFiSalon, the only concessionaire that paid any fees under the Park’s 1st RFP was driven out of business by that requirement. Ad revenue is negligible since such networks see a fraction of the impressions that even a second-tier website sees, and sponsorship dollars are only available to the most prominent parks like Madison Square Park and Bryant Park, and such deals are done generally only through whole-park sponsorship, not sponsorship of just the Wi-Fi network.

NYCwireless fundamentally believes and the industry has seen countless times (including the companies MetroFi and EarthLink, and cities San Francisco and Portland, for example) that Ad-based business models are unsustainable for individual hotspots and even reasonable sized hotspot networks. If DoITT and the City want to really ensure that free public Wi-Fi should be made available, and that locations other than the most highly trafficked and well-to-do are served, they need to step up and offer alternative funding models.

One thing to consider is that the companies that can do the installation and maintenance of high-quality outdoor hotspots (there are few) don’t have big advertising or sales teams to make them self-funding. These are two orthogonal specialties and forcing a single company to be capable of both severely limits the applicant pool and threatens the business viability of any participating company. NYCwireless has been successful because we provide all of the back-end technical know how and support for free public Wi-Fi hotspots. We are paid by our partners (BIDs and others) to perform this service, and they do the money raising since that’s what they are good at.

If DoITT and the NYC Government insist on Ad-based models, the best way to organize the funding of the organizations that build hotspots is to separately manage the sales of ads or sponsorship through either a centralized City agency or through a separate RFP that would be awarded to a marketing or ad-sales company. Hotspots would be required to use standard, open-source and free technology for displaying ads sold through the agency in order to receive funding through the RFP program.

Eligible Service Providers

Since each public space identified by DoITT has its own local community, and the problems and issues presented by each public space differ, NYCwireless has long believed that individually choosing providers for each city park is an important component in ensuring that appropriate Wi-Fi service is provided. Modeling its program after well-received plans put forth by Boston Wireless Task Force and implemented by OpenAirBoston, DoITT would do well to ensure that:

• Multiple providers are given the opportunity to install networks in each neighborhood, park, or set of parks
• Providers make use of interoperable equipment and technology so that a park’s equipment need not be reinstalled should that provider go out of business or be found unable to provide service, allowing a new provider to assume management of the equipment
• Local providers (those who’s base of operations is within the local neighborhood of the hotspot) or providers that have local community ties and affiliations, be preferred over those that are national or regional, since this will ensure the local community will help and support the hotspot

Additional Sites where Wi-Fi Makes Sense

Existing hotspots (with the exception for the Parks Department concession-based hotspots) sponsored by BIDs and other organizations have been built without much involvement by the Parks Department, and often in spite of any blockades the Parks Department has put up. BIDs and other organizations that have the resources to fund the creation of hotspots should be able to do so, and should be assisted by the NYC government (DoITT, Parks, etc.) without having to go through RFPs and other bureaucratic measures. When requested, the relevant City agency should facilitate all aspects of the creation of the hotspot, including providing free access to City owned building infrastructure.

Existing infrastructure must be made affordable and available. A big barrier to creating local community networks is getting access to places to put equipment. One solution would be to make City light poles available free or at low cost on an individual basis for the deployment of community supported networks. NYCwireless can help out with this initiative by helping to create a standard, weatherproof, upgradable hardware package, which we currently use in our outdoor wireless networks.

DoITT is looking mostly for one or a few companies to step up and do all the work. We’ve long talked about how the City can take a grass-roots approach to getting local parks and public spaces lit up, but for the most part, DoITT is focussing only on the biggest and most prominent locations. This is unfortunate, since the people in lower income neighborhoods and further afield areas are often the ones who benefit the most from such initiatives, but they seem to be mostly left out of this initiative.

DoITT and the City should make available to any interested local community organization or BID a set of resources to help them understand how they can help themselves set up a community-based hotspot. Such information resources would include technical information, organizational information and contacts for for-profit and not-for-profit organizations that can help the community strategize and build out the hotspot. It should also provide case studies for how other BIDs and community organizations built their hotspots, including cost structures, that would serve as models.

Most importantly, funding sources must be created that can support local organizations doing the heavy lifting. There are leaders in every community in New York City who have the power and will to create local solutions for bringing the internet to the people, and bringing all of their community members to the table. Setting up a fund such that any local group can apply for and be granted a few tens of thousands of dollars per year, for a period of 3-5 years, to use to bring Wi-Fi to a park or a public space would help tremendously.

Additionally, building developers and Condominium and Co-op boards have tremendous ability to create solutions, as NYCwireless’ work with Dunn Development Corporation has proved. Providing a tax incentive for for-profit developers and funding for non-profit developers to light up the public and semipublic spaces they create would ensure that anywhere people go they would have internet access.

Funding can also be attracted via state and federal sources, as well as through private companies and individuals. NYCwireless has been successful, but why not have hundreds of NYCwireless-like organizations, each working to solve local broadband issues.

New Technologies

In the long term, it is important to recognize that laptops and mobile devices may ship with newer wireless standards. However, the industry is quite a number of years from this happening, and for the foreseeable future, Wi-Fi is it–Apple introduced Wi-Fi on laptops 10 years ago, and those laptops are still compatible with today’s Wi-Fi networks. All laptops sold in the US today ship with Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n) adapters and have so for the past few years. They will continue to do so for a number of years to come, and the various forms of Wi-Fi are all backwards compatible with each other such that an 802.11b network deployed 8 years ago (by NYCwireless) is still usable by today’s computers. Wi-Fi is so widely distributed in homes and in businesses that it is almost unthinkable that computers 10 years from now won’t be able to use Wi-Fi networks installed over the next few years.

Additionally, Wi-Fi equipment installed in hotspots by NYCwireless generally has a 3-5 year lifetime for the Wi-Fi radios (our hotspots consist of access point computers with Wi-Fi radio cards). Our hardware is field upgradable to new Wi-Fi radios, and we expect that our hotspots, with upgraded radios, to have a 5-10 year lifetime.

Furthermore, there exist no other widely deployed local wireless internet access technologies that are available on the market, let alone ones available for $500-$1000 per hardware installation. WiMax, though beginning to see wider deployment, is not suitable as hotspot equipment (it is much more similar to cell data towers), and no standard shipping laptop today contains a WiMax card.

The wide availability and deployment of Wi-Fi makes it the only reasonable wireless technology choice for hotspot deployment, and we urge DoITT to require Wi-Fi as the technology of choice for any hotspot installed in a City Park or Public Space. We also recommend that DoITT require that open-standard, field-upgradable equipment is used, and require industry standards and possibly open hardware that ensures vendor lock in isn’t possible.

Insurance Requirements

NYCwireless has hotspots where there is NO equipment on park property at all (its on a neighboring building rooftop). Beyond insurance requirements for the actual installation and physical maintenance of equipment, no significant insurance requirements should be required. Furthermore, we have inquired of insurance agencies about seeking coverage according to the Parks Department’s requirements, and were informed that such insurance would be “an invitation for lawsuits” and would be expensive. The equipment used for NYCwireless hotspots is installed in publicly inaccessible locations, so liability for such equipment is inappropriate.

Basically, the City wants to light up more Parks, and is looking for ways to make this happen. We’ve provided lots of suggestions both on and off the record [1, 2, 3], and some of what we’ve said (and certainly what we’ve successfully done) has started to seep through. We should be celebrating that the City is asking questions first before issuing a blanket RFP and they seem to have learned a bit after being burned twice before by the Parks Departments previous RFPs, but the jury is still out on how progressive their ultimate plan will be. This RFI represents baby steps in the right direction, though there’s still a long road ahead for those of us that want to see free Wi-Fi in all city parks and public spaces.

The (Mostly) Good

• DoITT seems to recognize the value in Wi-Fi in parks and public spaces, and indicates that they are clearly aware of the work that organizations other than the Parks Department have done to grow free public Wi-Fi.
• DoITT is open to how they should organize any public-space Wi-Fi initiative, though there are still funding issues (see below).
• More parks are being added to the list of possible Parks Department sanctioned free Wi-Fi, however this does beg the question about how parks not on the “official” list are going to be able to get service.
• The City wants to work with more BIDs in offering free Wi-Fi, though they don’t acknowledge the fact that the BIDs and other organizations that have created free Wi-Fi hotspots have done so without much involvement by the Parks Department, and often in spite of any blockades the Parks Department has put up.
• DoITT is potentially open to other business models for building Wi-Fi hotspots, though as indicated below (and as I have been saying for a number of years), there aren’t any viable ones where businesses can independently fund the buildout and maintenance.
• The City is willing to provide both signage and some publicity for the Wi-Fi hotspots.
• The City will provide free access and use of city-owned property to facilitate the installation of equipment.
• DoITT seems open to reducing insurance requirements for running a hotspot, but even this doesn’t go far enough. We have hotspots where there is NO equipment on park property at all (its on a neighboring building rooftop). Why such installation strategies should require ANY general or personal liability insurance is a mystery (we do carry liability insurance for equipment installation and maintenance).
• Any submissions must be mostly non-proprietary, which means that we should all be able to read whatever companies submit for the RFI (we will publish our submission for all to read on this site). DoITT should go one step further and commit to actually publishing all submissions, so we don’t have to file Freedom of Information Law requests just to get them.

The Bad

• DoITT talks a lot about “other comparable wireless Internet service” versus Wi-Fi. In the long term, I suppose its important to recognize that laptops and mobile devices may ship with newer wireless standards, but we’re quite a number of years off from this happening, and for the forseeable future, Wi-Fi is it–Apple introduced Wi-Fi on laptops 10 years ago, and those laptops are still compatible with today’s Wi-Fi networks.
• Access to city-owned property isn’t the biggest issue in getting Wi-Fi deployed. Getting reasonably fast internet access lines (or WiMax uplinks) is the biggest problem. NYCwireless has had tremendous success rapidly deploying Wi-Fi equipment on building rooftops and even nearby businesses, but we (and WiFiSalon as well) have spent countless, fruitless hours getting internet lines from Verizon. In a recent example, it took over 4 months to get internet service to Wagner Park, even though our gear was installed within a month of signing a contract.
• DoITT is looking mostly for one or a few companies to step up and do all the work. We’ve long talked about how the City can take a grass-roots approach to getting local parks and public spaces lit up, but for the most part, DoITT is focussing only on the biggest and most prominent locations. This is unfortunate, since the people in lower income and further afield areas are often the ones who benefit the most from such initiatives, but they seem to be mostly left out of this party.

The Ugly

DoITT seems mostly steadfast in their insistence (as the Parks Department has been in the past) that no City funds should be spent on any buildout or maintenance of hotspots. This is still a really big sticking point: The first Parks RFP required that a concessionaire pay significant money to the Parks department, and the second Parks RFP required that a concessionaire pay some proposed amount of money to the Parks department.

There have been only a handful of interested companies (we offered to pay $1), and the WiFiSalon, the only concessionaire that paid any fees was driven out of business by that requirement. Ad revenue is negligible since such networks see a fraction of the impressions that even a second-tier blog sees, and sponsorship dollars are only available to the most prominent parks like Madison Square Park and Bryant Park, and such deals are done only through whole-park sponsorship, not sponsorship of just the Wi-Fi network.

As I’ve said many times before and as the industry has seen countless times, Ad-based business models are unsustainable for individual hotspots and even reasonable sized hotspot networks. If DoITT and the City want to really ensure that free public Wi-Fi should be made available, and that locations other than the most highly-trafficked and well-to-do are served, they need to step up and offer alternative funding models.

One thing to consider is that the companies that can do the installation and maintenance of high-quality outdoor hotspots (there are few) don’t have big advertising or sales teams to make them self-funding. These are two orthogonal specialties and forcing a single company to be capable of both severely limits the applicant pool and threatens the business viability of any participating company. NYCwireless has been successful because we provide all of the back-end technical know how and support for free public Wi-Fi hotspots. We are paid by our partners (BIDs and others) to perform this service, and they do the money raising since that’s what they are good at.

Here’s a press release from Josh Breitbart and Free Press about the hearing:

Groups Call on NYC to Open Public Airwaves to New Technology

City Council should embrace ‘white spaces’ and bring high-speed Internet to all New Yorkers

NEW YORK — Community media, public interest and immigrant rights advocates are calling on the New York City Council to endorse “white spaces” technology that could boost the economy and drive down the cost of mobile phone calls and Internet access.

White spaces are the unused portions of the public airwaves between television channels. According to a study conducted by Free Press, one-fifth of New York City’s television channels are currently not being used. New technology can use this vacant spectrum to send powerful, high-speed Internet signals — connecting New Yorkers to a fast, open and affordable Internet.

“Opening the white spaces would close the digital divide, and it wouldn’t cost us a dime — or, rather, it would save us a lot more than a dime on what we’re paying now for Internet access and cell phone service,” said Joshua Breitbart, policy director of People’s Production House.

The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering whether to open up the white spaces to the public. Engineers at the FCC, through extensive testing, have shown that low-power, mobile devices can utilize white spaces to connect to the Internet without interfering with TV broadcasts and wireless microphones on adjacent channels.

Lobbyists from the National Association of Broadcasters, cell phone carriers and wireless microphone companies have launched a misinformation campaign to prevent white spaces from being used to provide high-speed broadband access.

“Unfortunately, many key decision-makers simply lack the bandwidth to investigate the benefits of white spaces technology,” said Timothy Karr, campaign director of Free Press. “Instead they hear misinformation from industry lobbyists who come knocking with lies and spin meant to paint this technology as a danger to humanity.”

A draft resolution currently before the City Council, sponsored by Councilmember Gale Brewer and Speaker Christine Quinn, claims white space devices would be “devastating” to Broadway productions. The City Council Committee on Technology in Government is holding a hearing on the resolution on Monday, Sept. 29, 2008, at 10 a.m., in the Committee Room of City Hall. It is a public forum where anyone can testify.

“White spaces could provide an affordable alternative for people like me who use expensive phone cards to call family and friends back home in other countries,” said Abdulai Bah of Nah We Yone, a community group that advocates for African refugees in New York.

Very curious too that:

(a) The report from Diamond Consultants is only about the digital divide, since I was under the impression that the research was supposed to be about a lot more than just the digital divide, and

(b) This is being presented as “the Bloomberg Administration’s plans”, because I would think that the Bloomberg Administration would present their own plans and not have a consultant present for them, and further their “plans” should be based in part on the findings of the Broadband Advisory Committee, who’s whole point of existing is to bring a different perspective and set of expertise to any “plans” that are created.

Overall, I’m not too hopeful for what will be presented. I suspect it will be much too little, and frankly at least 6 months too late. This administration inexplicably has shown no spine for dealing with internet and network access issues and tends to kowtow to Verizon and Time Warner Cable. But, maybe, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

CITY HALL – On Wednesday, July 30th at 11:00am there will be a briefing from the Mayor’s Office and Diamond Consultants for the Broadband Advisory Committee regarding the Bloomberg Administration’s plans for bridging the digital divide in New York City.

The Broadband Advisory Committee was established in 2005 with the passage of Introduction 625-A creating a joint public broadband commission to advise the Mayor and the City Council of New York on how the resources of City government can be used to stimulate the private market so that residents and businesses of New York City have more options in terms of high-speed Internet access. The goal of the committee is to educate the general public about broadband and the newest communication technologies, and to give New York City residents the opportunity to comment on how the digital divide in New York City can be closed. To support these efforts the Broadband Advisory Committee has held public Broadband Hearings in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. The Committee will hold its fifth and final hearing in Staten Island this fall.

Diamond Consultants was hired by the New York City Economic Development Corporation to determine the breadth of the digital divide in New York City and develop programs and initiatives to provide greater digital inclusion for all residents. Chris O’Brien, a Partner in Diamond’s Public Sector practice, will be detailing Diamond’s findings and its recommendations for the City’s next steps.

The meeting will take place in the Committee of the Whole Room, City Hall, New York, NY on Wednesday, July 30th at 11:00 am. This is a public meeting and all are welcome to attend. For further information please contact Kunal Malhotra, Director of Legislation & Budget, 212-788-6975 or Kunal.Malhotra@council.nyc.gov.

Learning the right lessons and emulating the right policies here will enable the United States to improve our broadband performance faster than in the absence of proactive policies. The report analyzes the extent to which policy and non-policy factors drive broadband performance, and how broadband policies related to national leadership, incentives, competition, rural access, and consumer demand affect national broadband performance. Based on these findings the report makes a number of recommendations to boost U.S. broadband performance.

Executive Summary (pdf)
Full Report (pdf)

The report is extensive, and has some very good policy recommendations that should be heeded by all levels of government.

Overall, at the broadest level, nations with robust national broadband strategies–that is, those that make broadband a priority, coordinate across agencies, put real resources behind the strategy, and promote both supply and demand–fare better than those without.