You may be able to see the future of municipal wireless networks unfolding in Hermosa Beach, Calif. And it's not pretty.
The city last summer launched a public Wi-Fi network based on wireless mesh radios. The goal was to create free wireless Internet access as an alternative to broadband services offered by Adelphia, Verizon and others.
But since December, the five-person city council has been locked in increasingly rancorous debates over whether the wireless LAN (WLAN) should be expanded across this 1.3-square-mile bedroom community of about 19,000 people. While far removed from high-profile political battles in states such as Pennsylvania and Texas over whether municipal networks should be encouraged or restricted, Hermosa Beach has become a case study of the dictum by the late U.S. House Speaker Thomas O'Neill that "All politics is local."
Here, technology issues are intimately wedded to ideas about the proper role of government, business and citizenship, and about municipal priorities.
During a contentious January meeting, as reported by the local Easy Reader newspaper, Councilman Michael Keegan accused Councilman Sam Edgerton of not supporting the network "because you don't understand it." Edgerton told the audience: "This guy's like a rabid dog."
Two councilors say "yes" to creating a city-wide wireless network, two say "no," and one, who works for telecom vendor Cox Communications, abstains. The deadlock isn't expected to be broken until November, when wireless advocates face re-election and voters could face ballot questions. The council voted last week to have City Manager Steve Burrell draft two ballot measures: one to approve a free wireless network, another to determine if residents are willing to pay for it.
Making arguments
The network, dubbed Wi-Fi Hermosa, is the brainchild of Keegan, who runs a bakery at nearby Manhattan Beach. He calls himself a "self-taught Wi-Fi expert" who became interested in WLANs after reading a newspaper story. He set up an access point at the bakery and plugged it into a DSL line. Customers began using it, and word of mouth drew more users.
To Keegan, it seemed a simple matter to build a similar network that could do the same thing for all of Hermosa Beach.
"We already fix the roads, pick up trash, have concerts in the park and classes to teach you to dance," he says. "The Internet is like these. It's pretty close to being something that people will expect to have. It's close to being an essential service."
Nowhere near close enough, says Peter Tucker, a councilman opposed to spending money to extend the network. He says the city is strapped for cash and faces state-mandated upgrades to its aging infrastructure.
"I have to be able to look you in the eyes, and say 'We're not going to pay to improve your street, but we are going to give you free Wi-Fi,'" Tucker says. "You have to prioritize your needs and wants. This free Internet stuff would be way down on my list."
Tucker and Edgerton worry that other radio technologies such as WiMAX would make the network obsolete, that future upgrades will be costly and that the city might face legal liabilities. Keegan and fellow Councilor and current Mayor R.J. Reviczky say the network will save millions that residents would otherwise pay Verizon or Adelphia, and can pay for itself with advertising programs.
The network in question
The current WLAN covers the heart of downtown, including the beach and the pier, a prominent landmark. If residents go to the trouble and cost of mounting an antenna, the WLAN is accessible to about 30% of this coastal community's population of mainly middle- to upper-middle-class residents, according to Eric Black, president of LA Unplugged, the Hermosa Beach systems integrator that installed the initial network and runs it.
Black used wireless radios and mesh software from Strix Systems to create outdoor nodes. Each node has at least three 11M bit/sec 802.11b radios to handle connections with PCs or laptops fitted with wireless network interface cards. The node has two 54M bit/sec 802.11a radios - one receiving, one sending - to create a wireless backhaul, eliminating the need for Ethernet cabling. All the radios run near the upper power limits set by the FCC to extend their range. Several nodes are mounted on each small rooftop tower.
There are more than 2,000 unique media access control addresses, representing individual clients, that use the network, Black says. The peak throughput is about 5.92M bit/sec, based on a recent test he ran using a movie trailer from www.apple.com. "If you monitor the rate continuously, the typical rate is between 2M and 4M bit/sec," he says.
Today, the WLAN traffic hops via 802.11a wireless bridges to an independent ISP in nearby Long Beach. This, along with two T-1 lines leased for city use, is being replaced with a fiber DS-3 connection from the Wi-Fi Hermosa gateway at the fire station to a fiber trunk owned by Southern California Edison. The city is taking bids from various carriers for Internet access. "We bypassed Verizon and saved thousands" of dollars per month, Keegan says.
But even those savings haven't convinced his fellow councilmen to fund Phase Two of Wi-Fi Hermosa. About $35,000 from the city's general fund paid for the initial rollout of the network, which some councilors saw as a limited pilot test. Operational costs are about $4,500 per month or $54,000 per year, up from an earlier estimate of $24,000, according to a recent report by Burrell. Advertisers on Wi-Fi Hermosa's home page pay monthly fees that total about $1,200 to $1,500 per month.
The extension, estimated by the same report to cost about $126,000, would add more towers and nodes throughout the city, add a DSL connection for backup in case the fiber was cut and set up virtual LANs, which could be tailored for business and residential users.
Residential backers of the wireless network have packed recent council meetings, adding to the debate. But local businesses have been largely silent, and the Chamber of Commerce has not taken a position for or against the wireless network.
Many of the chamber's 350 business members are small and while most have broadband access, they don't tend to exploit it for e-commerce and haven't expressed much desire to let customers tap into it, says Carla Merriman, executive director of the Hermosa Beach Chamber of Commerce. What's more, the cost of switching to wireless isn't cheap. Two chamber members were told it would cost between $5,000 and $10,000 to upgrade their hotel properties to use the public WLAN, Merriman says.
Keegan is convinced that if the network were extended citywide, advertising would become more attractive and advertising revenue would increase to cover operational costs. It also would be possible, he says, to set up arrangements with online e-commerce sites such as Orbitz, which would refund to the city a cut of each plane ticket booked through the Wi-Fi Hermosa link to Orbitz.com.
"I don't think there are any gray areas here," says Deepa Bharath, a reporter for the Torrance, Calif., Daily Breeze who's been covering the debate for the past three months. "It's not moved anywhere. People have their minds made up."
And next November, they can act on those convictions.
RELATED LINKS
Philly's Wi-Fi network
Wisconsin's vision of a state-wide net
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