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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

L.A. Fails at First Wi-Fi Try

When Los Angeles city officials rejected all bids to install a citywide Wi-Fi network, it pointed up the difficulties in implementing such an ambitious plan in a large city. Bruce Miller, vice president of product marketing for the Riverbed Xirrus brand in Thousand Oaks, has experience installing the Wi-Fi connectivity equipment his company makes in citywide networks in Texas and Florida. He said a municipal Wi-Fi network doesn’t tend to duplicate connections inside businesses, such as a Starbucks or shopping mall or even private homes. Instead, these city networks fill in the gaps in outdoor areas and public spaces. For example, Xirrus installed a network in Redondo Beach, where free public access is offered at two city libraries. Also, people shouldn’t expect too much from free Wi-Fi connections – a problem that hurt the industry when the networks first started appearing about 10 years ago, Miller said. “People thought Wi-Fi was going to have better coverage than it did,” he explained. “To do that you have to have a lot more access points and a lot more money.” L.A. proposal Three years ago, Los Angeles officials embarked on a plan to bring free, basic Wi-Fi network to the entire city that has since been delayed by trouble in finding a vendor to provide the service. While other aspects of the CityLinkL.A. initiative to bring high-speed connectivity have been implemented, such as free computers for low-income families and Wi-Fi service at libraries and parks, a missing piece has been free basic Wi-Fi for all city residents. Los Angeles City Councilman Bob Blumenfield, who, along with Mayor Eric Garcetti, launched CityLinkL.A. in 2014, said that while progress has been disappointing, he is still committed to the idea of free wireless connections. “We still have our North Star of connectivity and we are going to make it happen one way or another,” said Blumenfield, who represents Council District 3 in the San Fernando Valley. Making Wi-Fi free is meant to address the digital divide, or the technology gap between the rich and low-income households. According to a 2013 study from the Public Policy Institute of California, 35 percent of the Los Angeles population did not have access at their home to a broadband connection for uploading and downloading high-quality voice, data, graphics and video services. The San Francisco area, by comparison, had 20 percent without access, while Orange/San Diego counties had 23 percent lacking broadband access in the home. “I think it is critical to make sure that we connect everyone and not increasingly feed the digital divide that is also exacerbating the economic divide in the state and city,” Blumenfield said. Connectivity, too, is important for attracting and retaining businesses. It used to be just high-tech companies needed a fast connection but that has now changed and it is businesses of all sizes, he added. “Even your pizzeria is going to be taking online orders and figuring out new ways to connect with consumers,” Blumenfield said. The city set a deadline for late 2015 on a request for proposals, a 100-plus page document seeking interested vendors who wanted to provide a paid wired 1 gigabit premium service for residents and businesses that would have a free basic wireless component and a reduced price wired service for underserved populations. The service would be operating within five years of signing the contract. In exchange, the city would offer underutilized assets for the access points and other equipment needed to create the network. These would include streetlight poles, underground fiber optics, access to land at police and fire stations and expedited permitting. Three companies responded to the proposal request – AT&T Inc. in Dallas; Time Warner Cable Inc., now known as Spectrum and acquired in 2016 by Charter Communications Inc., in Stamford Conn.; and WifiWireless Inc., in Dana Point. An independent panel made up of other city agencies, including Information Technology Agency, Department of Water and Power, Bureau of Engineering and the City Administrative Office, reviewed the proposals. Blumenfield said he was not involved with the review process. At the end of May, the city announced it had rejected the three proposals. “The sad reality is none of the responses met the criteria that we put forward, which was providing free regular streaming service for everybody,” Blumenfield said. In 2015, the city’s Information Technology Agency estimated it would take $4 billion to $6 billion to complete what the city wanted to accomplish but Blumenfield said those figures are probably a bit high. Any cost estimates in the proposals submitted by the three companies are proprietary information that cannot be publicly disclosed, he added. As shown by the rejection of the submitted proposals, bringing free Wi-Fi to an entire city is not without challenges. Tim Zimmerman, a research vice president who covers the networking and communications equipment industries for Gartner Inc., the information technology research company in Stamford, Conn., said some of the issues that need to be addressed include whether to allow free users to download operating system updates, which can take time and lock out other users, and usage during peak times, which, again, would decrease the number of people able to connect. “The spike in connectivity requirement if not planned either for the Wi-Fi or the backend starts to cause issues,” he added. And then there is the financing of such a project. While Los Angeles would expect the private vendors to pay for the network, some cities have funded Wi-Fi deployment on their own. To recoup costs, some turned to advertising on the network – watching an ad, say, before the connection was made – although that method was not always successful, Zimmerman said. “If I do it on advertising alone, that was the model that the municipal guys tried years ago and it didn’t work,” he added. Paying for connectivity In seeking to offer free Wi-Fi, Los Angeles follows a path taken by other cities, both large and small. New York, for instance, Introduced LinkNYC in late 2015. The network is made of kiosks replacing phone booths offering a gigabit of free Wi-Fi within a 150-foot radius. There are currently more than 800 active kiosks in the five boroughs and another 130 on the way. Boston has its Wicked Free Wi-Fi network that is for outdoors only and not designed to work inside buildings or homes. Other cities, Santa Monica among them, have taken a similar approach of outdoor only free access, or limiting it to only their downtown areas, such as in Escondido, Houston and El Paso, Texas. During city council committee meetings on the Los Angeles project, representatives came from other cities with their own networks to provide insight, Blumenfield said. Miller, of Riverbed Xirrus, said that while the company has not focused on municipal networks, it has done some in Florida and Texas, as well as in Brazil and European countries. In the Texas cities, the access points were places in police and fire stations, libraries, shopping malls and sports stadiums. “In these cases, we have some of these (networks) that cover multiple square miles of coverage across different venues that are owned and operated by a city,” Miller said. Cost aside, the successful deployments of municipal Wi-Fi have been those that have a business purpose that can justify the capital expense and the ongoing operational expense, said Zimmerman, with Gartner. These purposes can be wireless connections to allow credit card payments for parking meters or turning on and off LED street lights. For a small upgrade cost, the parking meter network can add a Wi-Fi connection, he said. “With today’s technology it could also be integrated with traffic management or video surveillance applications,” Zimmerman said. That is not too dissimilar to what the city of Burbank offers. Starting two years ago, the city’s water and power utility offered free wireless connections via its network used to collect data from electric and water meters. The service, however, is not guaranteed and some areas of the city may have spotty coverage while others can be overloaded with users. “It’s just out there if you can get it,” the utility’s then-general manager Ron Davis was quoted in a story on the service published in the Los Angeles Times. With the request for proposal process now over, Los Angeles has more flexibility in implementing the goals of the proposal since it can talk with companies that did not submit paperwork during that process, Blumenfield said. “We can start cobbling together all sorts of other ways to do this,” he added. Blumenfield said he is eyeing one way of convenient wireless access by making the BigBelly solar powered compacting trash bins in his district into connectivity nodes. He is also pushing to tie the city’s 311 app, used to request pickup of large items or to fill a pothole, into Alexa, the intelligent personal assistant developed by Amazon.com Inc. The city is open and receptive to ideas that will meet the goals of CityLinkL.A., he added. “Now is great time for folks who have creative business ideas that will advance connectivity to come forward,” Blumenfield said.

Mark Madler
Mark Madler
Mark R. Madler covers aviation & aerospace, manufacturing, technology, automotive & transportation, media & entertainment and the Antelope Valley. He joined the company in February 2006. Madler previously worked as a reporter for the Burbank Leader. Before that, he was a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago and several daily newspapers in the suburban Chicago area. He has a bachelor’s of science degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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