When is a WiFi network like a public playground? For some Canadian municipalities, it's when public wireless Internet access becomes part of the city budget. Accessing a wireless signal at will via mobile phone or laptop is not new, of course. But the emerging question is, who controls the wireless door to the Internet and how should its access be paid for?
Rather than buy that access from big-gun telecoms Bell Canada, Telus Mobility or Rogers Communications, some municipalities are building their own WiFi networks. But the moves are drawing criticism from critics and companies such as Rogers Wireless and Telus who say that their services are more efficient and that public money shouldn't compete against private businesses.
Maurice Gallant, chief information officer for the city of Fredericton, New Brunswick, doesn't buy that argument. For the past three years, Fredericton (core population 50,000) has been the poster child for municipal WiFi. Its free service, known as Fred eZone, covers the city's downtown core, and some fringe areas, with 1,200 WiFi units. Residents can connect to the Net via mobile devices from just about anywhere. "We don't build parks for profit or pools for profit. Libraries don't put Chapters out of business," Gallant says. "Why shouldn't cities build this kind of infrastructure too?"
Fred eZone began as a wireless way to connect existing fibre-optic cables to allow more Fredericton businesses and the city to use them in more places. With two universities, several colleges and half of New Brunswick's IT industry located in Fredericton, it was a high-priority project that has paid off, both in establishing the city as a serious IT centre and by opening the door to future cost-saving wireless applications, such as water-meter reading or parking-meters payments.
In fact, Fredericton boasts two WiFi systems, the free public one and a more robust but private proprietary wireless system for paying customers. The municipality benefits because each kilometre of fibre optics sees an "add-on" bundle of extra strands, the cost of which is mainly borne by the commissioning customer.
"Fredericton delivered its WiFi network for under $250,000," Gallant explains in an e-mail. "This was possible because over the past five years we renewed our community's telecommunications infrastructure (for paying customers), including a new fibre-optic network. The City's share of this million-dollar project was approximately $230,000."
Fredericton's compact size and existing fibre-optics cable made its WiFi "mesh" affordable. In the same way, Saskatchewan is also taking advantage of small municipal footprints and an abundance of existing high-speed networks. It recently rolled out free public WiFi at 450 locations in Saskatoon, Regina, Prince Albert and Moose Jaw.
Gallant says that all cities are looking for cost savings and that it was cheaper to build than buy wireless bandwidth from the telecom. The same equation is prompting Ontario cities such as Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph, Cambridge and Brantford to jump on the wagon.
Over the next few years, investment in WiFi meshes could pay off for cities as a revenue source, whether through more efficient delivery of public services or through provision of services, such as fleet tracking and communications, to paying customers.
But building a WiFi network is no easy task. First, you need a way to connect to the Internet, usually via ultra-fast fibre optics. Then you need to run the fibres through a conduit or across utility poles. Lastly, you need WiFi nodes, or transmitters, to link to the fibre and create the interconnecting grid of wireless coverage, known as a mesh.
You also need places to put those nodes, such as hydro poles or streetlights. Costs also vary according to the geography, the engineering required and how much the owners of those conduits and utility poles (usually the telecoms) want to charge for their use.
Setting up a WiFi network isn't a solution that will fit every municipal situation, cautions Lawrence Surtees, vice-president and senior telecom analyst at IDC Canada. There may, for example, be political resistance to spending public tax dollars to compete with private businesses that sell Internet access. And while WiFi is unlicensed and relatively cheap, its range is limited and prone to interference, making it less attractive in sprawling cities such as Toronto and Montreal.
More importantly, those WiFI nodes need to connect to the Internet via wired networks, and the large telecoms aren't keen to share their capacity for fear of cannibalizing both their Internet access and their cellular businesses.
Despite the challenges, however, many municipalities and public agencies are simply diving in and going it alone. In Saskatchewan, the provincial telecom, SaskTel, is a Crown corporation with a long record of projects for the public good. "Premier Lorne Calvert hosted a conference for young people last year and asked them what could we do to make our cities more progressive. And they told us: connectivity," recalls Richard Murray, executive director of policy and planning with the Saskatchewan Information Technology Office. "We saw this [free public WiFi]as an extension of our community net that provides Internet access to our schools, hospitals and other public institutions."
In addition to residents plugging in laptops, Murray sees children playing online with hand-held gaming consoles and making VoIP calls on their cellphones. "Once the system is in place, it's amazing how creative people get," Murray says. "I got a call from a university research project that wants to monitor the water levels in sewers to predict flooding and switch water away from affected areas. With WiFi, they can do it, and we're now working to make it happen."
Along with stoking the public good, there can be marked cost savings. "The reason municipal deployment of fibre optics and WiFi tripled between July 2005 and December 2006," says IDC Canada's Surtees, "is because it's cheaper for them to do it than to buy access from the networks." He believes that the potential for cities to deliver more services, while freeing themselves from the price bondage of network providers, will spur more municipal WiFi systems, but that people shouldn't automatically equate "municipal WiFi" with "free access."
But Michael Hennessy, vice-president of wireless broadband and content policy for Telus, warns that running a municipal WiFi network is not as simple as proponents make out. "The cost of maintaining, the billing, and capital investment in the network tends to be the backbreaker," Hennessy says. "And being the business, we're more efficient." He also wonders whether consumers will necessarily use a WiFi network, or want to pay for it if it's not free.
Toronto's WiFi model, One Zone, seemed to come from left field last September when it was launched by Toronto Hydro Telecom Inc. The subsidiary of Toronto Hydro had already been providing network services to businesses through its system of cables running parallel with power lines in its own underground conduits. The utility lured David Dobbin from Ottawa, where he had built a WiFi network for Ottawa Hydro, to launch the Toronto service over six square kilometres of the downtown core, which cost a reported $2 million.
One Zone's trial service was free for six months and drew more than 43,000 users. In April, it switched to pay-for-play: $5 a day or $30 a month. So far, users aren't biting in big numbers, though Dobbin is upbeat, saying the system is on target. Without demand, however, there's little chance it will expand out of the downtown core any time soon. (And although the system was initially intended for use with "smart meters" to record electricity use, which will be mandatory across Ontario by 2009, Toronto Hydro still hasn't decided how the meters would connect with the network.)
Despite the slow start, Dobbin foresees other municipal agencies and businesses using One Zone for their own reasons. "We're working with an Ottawa company with technology for a courier fleet," he says. "But we need to educate the community. We're network providers, not application developers."
And even as Canadian cities come to grips with WiFi, it is already being overtaken by newer technologies. The most enticing is WiMax, which runs over licensed bandwidth. But there's none left for municipalities-the big telecoms snapped up what was available at auction a few years ago. (Rogers and Bell use a version of WiMax to offer their Inukshuk wireless service.)
What Hydro Telecom's Dobbin and many others want is increased competition in the licensed spectrum space, saying that would reduce prices and open up telecommunications to more businesses. This argument brings into the mix Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrums, the next generation of wireless and a step up from WiMax. AWS promises ultra high-speed networks and opens the door for services and features currently enjoyed in Asia, where third- and fourth-generation (4G) wireless has already been deployed. With transmission speeds five times faster than the average home Internet connection, 4G heralds an era where users could stream high-quality music and videos to their phones, along with real-time images from their home or traffic cameras.
In the fall, Industry Canada will begin entertaining bids for the 2008 auction of AWS public spectrums and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission will hold its auction for newly freed spectrums next year. The new spectrums and their buyers are expected to shape the future of mobile networking and could make current cellphone technology obsolete, as VoIP threatens to do with the wired telephony world.
That's because the trend, says Surtees, is toward the Internet model of converged, shared networks linking wired and wireless, regardless of who owns what, and away from the point-to-point delivery of single services such as cell calls over proprietary networks.
It's an argument gaining strength in the United States, where search engine giant Google says it will enter the bidding for spectrums if the FCC implements the open-access policy. In Canada, the fear is that the telecom giants will snap up the licences, shutting the door on the kinds of competitive pricing options seen in Europe and the United States.
Perhaps surprisingly, Telus's Hennessy concurs, at least in part. Networks are converging, he agrees. No matter what the device in the user's hands-cellphone, laptop, GPS, TV remote-everything is running on the Internet, where net neutrality is a long-established policy.
For Hennessy, the question is how events would unfold. Telus doesn't want to see its wireless and wired network "expropriated" under government-dictated terms and then watch its business be eroded by those offering similar services without having invested anything to build the network. What needs to be worked out, Hennessy says, are the terms under which net neutrality would work. "We don't want to see an artificially low rate for access set, like long distance, which we've seen is a recipe for disaster," says Hennessy.
Rogers Wireless meanwhile, isn't buying any of it. Odette Coleman, the company's corporate communications manager, points to its deal with Vidéotron, and Bell Mobility's similar deal with Virgin Mobile, in which both lease bandwidth to operate as virtual mobile providers. "Since the competitive free market is providing access to mobile networks for new cellphone companies, we see no reason for the government to mandate access arrangements," Coleman said an e-mail. "Mandated shared or open networks should not be imposed in the wireless market where more creative, market-driven access solutions are already being imposed."
Until that changes, the big Canadian telecoms will continue to control how most users wirelessly access the Internet. Even with AWS on the horizon, some observers worry that those telecoms will dig deep to maintain a lock on the marketplace.
"It does nothing for anyone to have regulations that continue to favour the same companies that, with their own vested interests at heart, continue to keep the cost of Internet access artificially high," Toronto Hydro Telecom vice-president Sharyn Gravelle noted at a conference last January.
To that end, a consortium of cable companies and smaller telecoms (including Shaw, Quebecor, Cogeco, MTS Allstream and Toronto Hydro Telecom) want the feds to set aside spectrum to give new players an entrance into the market-something both Rogers Wireless and Bell Mobility oppose. Consortium members argue that Canada lags in areas of competition, pricing and new features, even as Canadian cell carriers enjoy the highest average return-per-user in the world. Shaking up the status quo would change that, the group says.
For example, Toronto Hydro Telecom's Dobbin proposes a mobile service that would let users with WiFi-equipped handsets make cellular calls by switching between the two technologies; T-Mobile offers such a service in the United States for about $10 a month. "Toronto Hydro Telecom doesn't want to build a new cellular network across Canada," Dobbin says. "We just want the different systems to interoperate, to allow one user on one system to have access to another system."
There's no question Canadian cities are looking to free themselves from costly cellular charges, ranging from municipal workers' BlackBerrys to solar-powered parking meters, which process credit cards wirelessly. Cities are also keen to leverage their own wireless systems for radio-frequency based services such as dispatching municipal emergency services, video surveillance in high-crime areas and TV broadcasts on public transit, which can generate advertising and new revenue streams.
In the process (and pending the spectrum auction and any change of policy by the big telecoms), municipalities are finding that laying their own fibre optics and using WiFi improves services and makes better use of resources, says Surtees. "The cost of laying fibre optics is coming down," he says, "and there are some incredible emerging technologies." "It isn't as much about WiFi as it is the backbone," Surtees adds. "The payoff isn't going to be immediate, but it will be a couple of years down the road."