Vancouver, Washington, gets its first free public Wi-Fi for a total of over $30,000 and after a year of planning: Vancouver is a popular town to live in for folks who like to shop just across the Columbia River in sales-tax-free Oregon and live in income-tax-free Washington. It's also a less-bustling town than its neighbor, Portland, edging right into undeveloped countyside, even as it's become a sprawl-y bedroom community.
While Personal Telco in Portland has what they report as over 100 active nodes in their free network, including prominent ones in Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown, Vancouver's first free public space Wi-Fi appears to be a 3 Mbps Internet feed over two antennas relayed from a nearby building into Esther Short Park.
The project involved $30,000 from HP in goods and services as a grant, which seems improbable just to start with, since the coverage area and relaying involves very little engineering and could use off-the-shelf equipment. It would be hard to spend more than a few thousand dollars at commercial rates and using enterprise hardware to achieve the project's scope. But HP didn't install the equipment: that was done at a reduced rate by Vancouver Power Systems. Bandwidth and authentication services are being donated by local companies. The equipment is 802.11b, not 802.11g, even.
The nature of outdoor Wi-Fi seems to be profoundly misunderstood by either the reporter, the officials and others talking about the project, or both:
Patrick Gilbride, the city’s information technology manager and main liaison to the project...[said] “If this is successful, I think it will be attractive to look at providing a service that helps local businesses on a wider scale.” To do so would require a much larger investment in equipment – or a much stronger signal than Wi-Fi, whose range is generally limited to a few hundred feet. Gilbride pointed with enthusiasm to the coming next-generation of wireless, known as WiMax, which promises an exponentially larger coverage area than Wi-Fi. “WiMax could be huge, but we’ll have to wait a year or two before it’s really available,” Gilbride said.
In outdoor, public spaces, Wi-Fi can easily span several hundred feet unimpeded, and more with a little antenna design or a small cluster of dumb access points (as little as $50 each) with sectorized antennas. WiMax might help on the backhaul, but moving 3 Mbps in any direct line of site can be accomplished for as little as a few hundred dollars without any special involvement. The WiMax flavor that would offer the coverage in question is probably 2007 to 2009 timeframe; the near-term WiMax is only point-to-point service, and similar technology is already available today, just without the brand and standardization. Mobile WiMax is currently a pipe dream that cellular data and Wi-Fi might render entirely moot, but we'll see.
I asked NIgel Ballard, one of the movers at Personal Telco (and a former employee of ElevenWireless, which donated its services for the Esther Short project), about the cost and timeframe of the Vancouver project. He wrote back:
It was a year in planning and consists of two, count 'em, two access points in total! I told the journalist [who reported this story] that I had a coffee shop on 21st avenue that had three access points, respectively running A, B, G and it took three hours to unwire!
While it's unfair to compare coffeeshops and public parks, Personal Telco has unwired larger spaces, as have groups around the country. In Salem, Mass., Michael Oh worked with a community group to raise $10,000 to build out three full streets of downtown access with an aggregate bandwidth of 18 Mbps (three 6 Mbps DSL lines, one for each street). The $10,000 covers the cost of survey, equipment, installation, and most of the cost of the first year of unsubsidized bandwidth.