This episode was produced by UIC communication students Taylor Crossley ‘16, Yadira Montoya ‘16, and Nader Haddad ’16. It sifts through a range of factors that play into the promise, success, and failure of municipal Wi-Fi initiatives. Dr. Harvey Jassem (U of Hartford) was the guest on the show.
This podcast is a class exercise and it does not represent the views and opinions of the University of Illinois at Chicago or any of its departments.
Produced: Spring 2016.
Transcript
[TAYLOR CROSSLEY] Hi guys! It’s Taylor.
[YADIRA MONTOYA] Yadira.
[NADER HADDAD] Nader.
[MUSIC: InfoNation theme music and intro] And welcome to InfoNation, University of Illinois at Chicago’s very own podcast created by students, for the students. At InfoNation we discover how media, information, and communication are created, governed and used. Produced by upper-level communication students in the Department of Communication, InfoNation brings academic research to help make sense of our increasingly mediated society. We go to the library so that you won’t have to.
[TC] Today we’ll be talking about municipal wireless networks. We’ll define what this term means, some successes and failures of municipal Wi-Fi, and later will also talk to an expert on the subject of municipal Wi-Fi. So Yadira what are municipal Wi-Fi networks?
[YM] Dr. Harvey Jassem describes municipal Wi-Fi as local networks of wireless Internet access that adhere to 802.11 technological standards and are built by or for local governments for the use of the government and the people and businesses in that area.
[TC] So in the early 2000’s there wasn’t a lot of Wi-Fi that was very visible. People weren’t really using Wi-Fi that much…
[YM] It was just starting up really.
[TC] Yeah, it was just starting up it was just kind of becoming a thing that people knew about. I remember being in maybe the sixth grade and we still didn’t have Wi-Fi in my house yet so it was still very, very new.
[YM] True. So after this happened like, after a couple of years, local government actually got interested in the idea of municipal Wi-Fi. They thought that maybe this could be the next big thing.
[TC] But it wasn’t very well thought out, it wasn’t very effective, I mean there’s a lot that goes into building and creating these municipal a Wi-Fi systems. So in 2005, there were reportedly 82 municipal Wi-Fi networks in the US as of July, which was up 44 from the previous year. And that we found in an article written by Bar and Park, and that was written in 2006, so just kind of showing where it started; the municipal Wi-Fi networks were kind of growing quickly. But once it plateaued off, a lot of people kind of realizing how expensive they were and how difficult it was to create them and keep them running, that made the concept of municipal Wi-Fi and creating those systems in large-scale cities taper off.
[YM] Definitely. I feel like there’s just so much that would go into a project like that. Coming into more recent days, though, there has been a plan in New York who has started to replace old telephone booths with hotspots, Internet hotspots. So that’s actually really interesting. I mean it’s not the exact same thing as the people were planning to create in the early 2000’s but I feel like this is still really a big thing that they’re actually doing this and that it’s actually working out.
[TC] Yes, that’s called the LinkNYC system and while it is very popular, kind of growing and the concept is kind of showing a lot of promise, it’s also being criticized for mostly being about advertising based on the fact that the systems would be kind of in a small proximity, you know most people aren’t just going to stand next to a phone booth to use Wi-Fi when they can move about and use their data.
[YM] So that’s one of the major problems I’d say. You know, people ask why municipal Wi-Fi would be helpful what would it give you or offer you if we did have this. I mean pretty much all of us have smart phones where we have data monthly plans with our phone service. We have tablets, we have laptops, we have a lot of different kinds of devices that we can hook up to Wi-Fi and I know there’s a lot of places where Wi-Fi is offered like some local restaurants even like McDonald’s—
[TC] Starbucks, Panera, some stores, I know I went to TJ Maxx and Macy’s and they’ll have their own Wi-Fi networks in the building.
[YM] And even of course here at school, I mean we are all connected to the Wi-Fi here. But what would happen if, you know we go somewhere where we wouldn’t be able to be connected to the Wi-Fi or we run out of our data from our monthly plan?
[TC] I mean these are reasons that municipal Wi-Fi could be helpful systems, if we were to implement them widespread, but there still a lot of negatives to it as well.
[YM] There are some people that should be connected and that want to be connected and they just don’t have the resources—
[TC] …Opportunity—yeah, the resources, for sure.
[YM] Mhmm
[TC] And I think that in those cases that is when municipal Wi-Fi would be most helpful.
[YM] Let’s talk about one of the successes of municipal Wi-Fi. Picco-Schwendener and Cantoni wrote, in 2015, about a Wi-Fi network that was actually implemented in 2008 in the city of Lugano in Switzerland. So in this paper that they write, they actually talk about how this Wi-Fi network has worked in the tourist city where residence and the commuters, the tourist and everyone there can actually connect to Wi-Fi free. The name of the Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi Lugano.
[TC] And that was a success story. I mean it’s a successful use of the concept of municipal Wi-Fi and showing in fairly recent times, you know, 2008 is kind of a while ago, but, I mean, more recent than pretty much anything else besides the LinkNYC, which is a little bit different in terms of not fully blanketing an entire area. So I think that that’s one way to definitely mention the kind of success, I mean, it seems to be working well as far as we know.
[YM] Mhmm. I think it’s actually really interesting that they tied this municipal Wi-Fi network to tourism. Because I feel like probably this city of Lugano is actually getting, you know, a lot of benefits from this. Not only are the people that live there can connect to it, I mean, all the tourists are; it’s bringing more tourists, it’s bringing more money into the city itself and that’s probably what is able to support this so it’s really smart.
[TC] And too, like it’s nice when tourist-wise people coming from other countries, they may not have those cell phone plans that go over through other countries or they may not want to pay for them, you know like, they get really expensive so being able to have that Wi-Fi you can still be connected you can still, in some cases, make phone calls over Wi-Fi you know you have the option of Skype or FaceTime or those kind of things so being able to stay connected in that sense especially in like a tourism, kind of travel concept, I think is really important.
[YM] Yeah and Picco-Schwendener and Cantoni also note that the vast majority of the respondents that are using this Wi-Fi which is 73.4% are connected with a smart phone. So like you said it’s probably those tourist that don’t-aren’t able to use their data overseas and internationally. So the next time you hit up Switzerland go to Lugano they have free Wi-Fi!
[TC] They have free Wi-Fi! I think that would be the best place to visit Switzerland just for that reason alone.
[YM] Mhmm. Alright this has been a great discussion so far Taylor.
[TC] It has.
[YM] So let’s move on to our next portion of our podcast. We’re actually going to be interviewing an expert Dr. Harvey Jassem. We will be talking about his research in municipal Wi-Fi and about his article Municipal Wi-Fi: The Coda.
[YM] Thank you for joining us Dr. would you like to introduce yourself?
[HARVEY JASSEM] Sure. I am Harvey Jassem. I am Professor of Communication at the University of Hartford School of Communication. This is perhaps relevant: on the executive board of the urban communication foundation. So we study and fund research on cities and communication issues.
[YM] Could you talk to us a little bit about the municipal Wi-Fi you had dreamed of or hoped for based on your writings and your research?
[HJ] Sure. You’ll notice I haven’t written much lately on municipal Wi-Fi. Municipal Wi-Fi, when it first started was, I thought, important because it promised to bridge the digital divide between basically poor and wealthier people. When the Internet was relatively young, it was educated wealthy people who could afford it. And to some degree that was fine. It didn’t really matter; there wasn’t all that much of importance on the Internet. But as the Internet has become more and more important, go and try to find a job without having access to the Internet, you’re really going to be essentially in bad shape and have some disadvantages if you’re not able to communicate on what’s become really a serious backbone of communication. So, some areas, urban areas, don’t have and didn’t have available broadband or Internet for a number of reasons. Some of them were just were out of the way, others people couldn’t afford to get the Internet. Some places the Internet providers, the broadband providers weren’t wiring up certain neighborhoods. Generally, cities tried to require that all neighborhoods be wired up but that met with mixed success so municipal Wi-Fi was an attempt by cities to say, “we have people who need Internet access who can’t get it either because they can’t afford it or it’s simply not available in their neighborhood or because they have it at home but not in the streets.” What I hoped for and what other proponents of municipal Wi-Fi hoped for was that cities would build the information highway just as cities built streets and highways.
[NADER HADDAD] Have your views or ideas of municipal Wi-Fi changed since you first got interested in the topic.
[HJ] Yes and that’s because the alternatives have changed. So I still want everyone to have access to the Internet, but increasingly people are walking around with smartphones. Most wireless phones are smartphones most Americans have wireless cell phones in their pockets, in their backpacks or wherever and as a result most people can get Internet access without municipal Wi-Fi. Not only that, not only are we carrying around our own equipment, but more and more entities, stores and various kinds of shops, are making Wi-Fi available. There’s been some question about how to charge for Wi-Fi; Wi-Fi is not free somebody’s got to pay the bill. But you know if you go into a Starbucks or McDonald’s they’re happy to give free Wi-Fi to get you in the door. Unlike the late 1990s where there weren’t a lot of hot spots available to get free Wi-Fi, increasingly there are alternatives. The Internet providers that do this for a living, the big telecommunication companies, the Verizons, the AT&Ts, the Comcasts, Time Warner and various cable companies hate municipal Wi-Fi. And they have been fighting it and you can understand why. They are investing billions of dollars in a network and the only way that makes sense is if they can charge somebody to get their money back. If everybody in Chicago can get free Wi-Fi, why pay for Verizon or AT&T or anybody else for a data plan? It’s understandable why they’re opposed to it and they’ve had some luck getting cities prohibited from building Wi-Fi. I don’t support that, but I think cities have said, budgets are tight we can’t really support all the maintenance that goes into Wi-Fi and so the buildout of municipal Wi-Fi has slowed down and stopped in a lot of areas. There are certain places where there’s some new growth and we’ll talk about that but there are so many other options now and it may not be frankly all that important.
[YM] What do you think the current demands are for municipal Wi-Fi services in cities, especially in urban cities like here in Chicago?
[HJ] I think it’s mixed. I don’t think it’s as powerful as a demand as I would’ve anticipated 10 years ago. So I think it’s mixed. And interestingly it’s coming from a couple of different directions. It’s coming from some poor people and community groups that represent the underclass if you will, and it’s coming from advertisers. One of the interesting drivers of the newer municipal Wi-Fi, is that advertisers are always trying to reach us. And one of the ways they reach us is through our use of broadband and when they do reach us through broadband they know more about us then they do when we’re watching NBC or reading the Chicago Tribune. If you’re reading the Chicago Tribune the advertiser doesn’t know if you’re actually reading their ad or where you are when you’re reading the ad or what time it is when you’re reading the ad or what you’ve just done or what you’re doing next. If the advertiser can reach you on your smartphone, they know exactly where you are, what time it is, who you are, what you have Googled in the last five minutes and they can really tailor an ad to you. Advertisers would love us to be on our smart phones and they would be willing to pay for Wi-Fi, if that’s what it took to get us to see their ad.
[NH] What would the benefits be of having municipal Wi-Fi?
[HJ] Well the benefits would be to narrow the gap between the haves and the have not’s. That’s the benefit of free or low-cost Wi-Fi.
[YM] Very true. What are your thoughts about New York replacing the phone booths with the Wi-Fi hotspots?
[HJ] A potential win-win. I think it’s an opportunity that everybody else oughta be looking carefully, at least other major cities. Cities have had these phone…I don’t even know what you call them anymore, booths but they’re not even phone booths anymore but public payphones available for a long time. It used to be important. Increasingly, they don’t work and they’ve been pulled out because people are putting their quarters in them. So why have them? Why maintain them? That doesn’t mean we can’t use the infrastructure that’s in the street, the wires that are in the street, the electricity that went in those phones has already been provided; the wires are there. What’s going on in New York is that private entrepreneurs have come in and said give us a monopoly, give us, New York City, the right to put in a new kind of alternative to a public phone booth. We’ll provide free Wi-Fi, we’ll provide free calls to people, we’ll provide charging stations so you can plug in your phone and charge up and do that sort of thing. So that’s a lot of public good, basically all for free. All we want to do is be able to advertise. And in a sense what these companies are saying is, we’re going to get a free services to the people who walk by, drive-by or maybe live right near these free Wi-Fi kiosks. The city of New York is supposed to get money from this operation. Supposed to be getting, I forget how many, 700-900 of these stations put up for free in terms of, it won’t cost the city anything. So the city is not investing any money, the city is getting services for its inhabitants. There will be, I don’t know if they’re iPads or some sort of tablets out there, but there will be tablets where you can just use the tablet to make a call or do a search. So it’s very convenient. Whether the area is cluttered with advertisements, that can be a pain in the neck. There is some issue about whether there will be a loss of privacy. When you put up devices like this we can all be tracked more readily than ever.
[YM] Could you talk to us about the San Francisco project that they tried to build but it kind of failed?
[HJ] Well I don’t know the specifics of why that one failed. But there were a lot of cities, San Francisco, Philadelphia, various cities that built projects that failed and what seemed common about all the failures was that it was a combination of: it was expensive and it was expensive to maintain and it wasn’t being used all that much. I think there are plenty of opportunities in San Francisco to get Wi-Fi from coffee shops and various other places that the city basically gave up and said it’s just not enough benefit to spending our money on this thing and there really is a lot of maintenance. This New York thing, they’re giving out a 12 year contract and in those 12 years all the equipment is supposed to be upgraded two more times after they’re put in, so essentially every four years. That’s expensive and if the advertisers don’t come through or if advertisers find a new way to reach us then that will go away we’ll see what happens but four years is a long time in technology.
[TC] What do you think has to take place in order to have units up a Wi-Fi in the United States?
[HJ] If by municipal Wi-Fi, you mean cities paying for and setting up free Wi-Fi, I don’t think that’s likely. If you mean private companies may be partnering with cities to make some sort of broadband available for free or for low cost, I think what’s going to have to drive that is probably advertisers.
[TC] Thank you so much for sitting down and talking to us, taking the time out I really appreciate it.
[HJ] My pleasure good luck and be successful
[YM & NH] Thank you so much.
[TC] If you’re looking for more information on municipal Wi-Fi systems you can check out Muniwireless.com. It’s a great resource if you’re just looking to learn more about it. It’s got a long list of all the municipal Wi-Fi systems that exist right now and articles on different ones that are popping up. So if you’re looking for more information that’s a great place to start. Otherwise thanks for listening to InfoNation!
[MUSIC: Podcast outro and theme music] Thank you for listening to InfoNation coming to you from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Communication. Our theme music was created by Shawn Rizvi, a 2015 graduate. We hope piqued your interest and you learn something new today. Please feel free to engage by rating commenting or sharing our episodes.
Additional readings
Bar, F., & Park, N. (2006). Municipal Wi-Fi networks: The goals, practices, and policy implications of the US case. Communications & Strategies, 61(1), 107-125.
Fraser, E. M. (2009). The failure of public Wi-Fi. Journal of Technology Law & Policy, 14(2),161-177.
Jassem, H. C. (2010). Municipal Wi-Fi: the coda. Journal of Urban Technology, 17(2), 3-20.
Lai, B., & Brewer, G. A. (2006). New York City’s broadband problem and the role of municipal government in promoting a private-sector solution. Technology in Society, 28(1), 245-259.
Mandviwalla, M., Jain, A., Fesenmaier, J., Smith, J., Weinberg, P., & Meyers, G. (2008).
Municipal broadband wireless networks. Communications of the ACM, 51(2), 72-80. doi:10.1145/1314215.1314228
Park, N., & Lee, K. M. (2010). Wireless Cities: Local Governments’ Involvement in the Shaping of Wi-Fi Networks. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 54(3), 425-442.
Picco-Schwendener, A., & Cantoni, L. (2015). Tourists and Municipal Wi-Fi Networks (MWN): The Case of Lugano (Switzerland). In Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2015 (pp. 565-578). Springer International Publishing.
Tapia, A. H., Powell, A., & Ortiz, J. A. (2009). Reforming policy to promote local broadband networks. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 33(4), 354-375.
Vilensky, M. (2014, Nov 17). New york city hangs up pay phones, plans ‘LinkNYC’ digital hubs; will offer public wi-fi, free domestic calls, even video-chat. Wall Street Journal (Online).
Wi-pie in the sky?(2006, Mar 11, 2006). The Economist, 378, 20.