The term ‘muni Wi-Fi’ is rarely heard these days, since the bubble surrounding publicly owned, free city networks burst spectacularly in 2007 after a couple of years of often overwrought enthusiasm. However, some cities have clung to their dreams of universal, publicly subsidized broadband for all and even managed to make the books balance by harnessing the Wi-Fi networks for their own services, such as public safety. And there have been some quite spectacular city-backed initiatives in recent years, using Wi-Fi and/or cellular access points, including the London metrozones for the Olympic Games and for the key business districts.
Some cities are even supporting fiber-based projects, perhaps with Google’s own initiatives in this area in mind. Los Angeles last week announced ambitious proposals for a city-wide fiber network ‘ though this has none of the idealistic, publicly funded approach of the early metrozones or of the stimulus projects of 2007. Instead, LA wants the network provider to shoulder all the costs of the build-out as well as offering free services up to 5Mbps to everyone who asks, plus access for ISPs.
The city council will issue a request for proposal (RFP) for a fiber-to-the-home system which will reach each of the city’s 3.5m residents and its businesses, which will cost between $3bn and $5bn ‘ to be funded by the operator. In exchange, the city will expedite the planning and inspection process, and some of the fees involved, and the carrier will be able to offer premium services, for revenue, up to 1Gbps.
However, this sounds unattractive to almost any operator, especially as it does not appear to include wireless ‘ where the city council’s help with sites and regulations might be a real incentive ‘ and harks back to days when local governments had not yet recognized their lack of expertise in telecoms, and when universal access was a greater issue than it is now in major metros.
In general, local authorities have dropped the baton when it comes to leading public metrozone deployments. That is partly because commercial operators are covering cities so effectively, especially as cellcos and cablecos step up their investments in Wi-Fi and lure customers with increasingly attractive rates and bundles. Social and rural roll-outs tend to be driven by national governments rather than cities, though there are interesting experiments in areas like white spaces spectrum, especially in emerging economies.
In the heartland of the original muni Wi-Fi boom, the US, however, there is another important trend emerging, to community control of universal broadband services. Some of this has already been taken over by the established providers, notably the FON service, which offers residents reduced rates if they leave some of the capacity of their home Wi-Fi routers open for passers-by to use. Carriers like Deutsche Telekom and the UK’s BT have partnered with FON to expand their Wi-Fi coverage overnight while others have their own version of the approach, such as Free in France and the leading US cablecos.
But other projects remain independent for now. Like FON, Gowex comes from Spain, and now offers free municipal Wi-Fi services in about 80 cities worldwide. Its latest ‘social Wi-Fi network’ is in New York City, and it is hoping to attract FON-style partnerships with mobile and fixed operators, all desperate for more broadband capacity via Wi-Fi.
The New York project is called We2. Gowex’s approach is not home-based like FON’s at this stage, but focuses on turning private Wi-Fi access points in businesses such as shops and restaurants into free, public ones. The We2 network will also include access to Gowex’s hotspots in cities worldwide. Users can use the We2 App to see other We2 users on the network and engage in peer-to-peer social networking. In addition, small and medium-sized businesses can use the system to offer location aware promotions to visitors who have opted in.
Most of Gowex’s networks to date have been based on free municipal services in cooperation with city councils, with the Spanish firm making revenue from roaming and offload charges to carriers, advertising and premium services. But as if aware that this model is old-fashioned, the company is boosting its social networking aspects and looking to more strategic alliances with telcos rather than cities. It has roaming agreements with AT&T and Deutsche Telekom, which complement those carriers’ residential-focused FON roaming deals. Gowex also said it will expand its business model to 300 cities before 2020.
This is yet another take on community and shared Wi-Fi, to join FON and the services such as WeFi and Devicescape, whose client applications allow users to discover and link automatically to a huge network of free, curated hotspots worldwide (though these two steer clear of residential APs for now, for reasons of quality control).
We2 will be headed by Carlos Gomez Vendrell, who says private Wi-Fi has been estimated to offer 30 times more capacity than all the world’s cellular networks put together, though much of it is closed-off and underused. The We2 application “will enable everybody to seamlessly roam on this new network that we are creating as well as on the rest of the Gowex network’, he promised, and the firm will significantly increase its deployment of hotspots in NYC, adding to the 2,000-plus it already operates.
Another riff on community broadband comes from Karma, which is focusing on cellular technologies. It has been running a shared 4G service as an MVNO on the Clearwire (now Sprint) WiMAX network and is in the process of moving across to LTE and expanding to more cities.
Karma takes a viral approach to sharing 4G bandwidth. The business model is to ship a $79 box that takes a wireless signal from Sprint and turns it into a walking hotspot, which anyone can share. When the consumer loads a browser they receive the message ‘Hi this is this guy’s Wi-Fi, do you want to us it?’ If the consumer goes ahead, they receive 100Mbytes of data free to start with, and the service also gives 100Mbytes to the person who owns the device. Karma is now working on a new version of the device which will support either LTE or WiMAX.
Customers can also pay $14 per Gbyte if they have no credit on the system, which can be a lot cheaper than going over an LTE monthly cap or buying Wi-Fi from different providers in different locations. Sprint already offers 4G LTE in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and San Juan, Puerto Rico and Karma reckons this will take it to 230 cities across the US. Karma also has dreams of taking its service outside the US.
Clearwire has, by offering a wholesale proposition, engendered a number of this type of start-up, reselling its capacity. Another widely known brand that does this is FreedomPop, which has been going for just under a year, offering broadband at lower cos than many home DSL lines. FreedomPop was started by Niklas Zennstrom, who also founded Skype.