Students Work on Singapore Community Wireless

I was recently contacted by a group of students, Jacinta, Lionel, Amy and YuGai, from Raffles Junior College in Singapore, asking about NYCwireless. They are interested in bringing public wireless networking to the people of Singapore, and I support them completely. We need more students working on Community Wireless.

Their questions, and my responses:

Since setting up of the wireless service, just exactly how popular is this service since you started it in terms of average daily users?

NYCwireless has helped create dozens of public hotspots with partners throughout Manhattan. Some of our most popular parks, like Bryant Park, Union Square Park, City Hall Park, and the South Street Seaport see hundreds of users per day.

What are some of the feedbacks(positive and negative) you have got from the members of the public?

The best feedback we get is that people use our hotspots. Most users don’t even contact us about their usage.

We have held a number of events at our hotspots, including educational sessions about Wi-Fi and big Arts Festivals. Spectropolis was incredibly successful, and drew thousands of people from around New York and around the country (some even internationally).

This is a non-profit organization. How do you pay for the cost of setting up this service? Do you have the government funding the organization?

All of our hotspots are funded by partner organizations. For example, the hotspots that are located in Downtown Manhattan are sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown New York, a Business Improvement District company. Some of our personal hotspots are set up and run by individual volunteers. We have some funding through personal donations to NYCwireless, but no formal funding arrangements.

What are the costs of set up and maintenance like?

A public park hotspot costs on the order of a few $1000’s. The internet is brought in via a local ISP at a cost of about $100/month. The hardware costs only about $500-$1000.

Is this service available 24 hours?

Yes. All of our hotspots are online all day. Some even operate all year round (it gets very cold in NYC in the middle of February!).

What are the problems the organization face in implementing the service?

Some of the difficulties include getting access to surrounding buildings to mount the wireless hardware, and promoting the availability of the wireless service. We have a great record of accomplishment with our deployments, which rarely need any maintenance.

Following the success of this project, what are the impacts that it has on the people and economy?

As one of the first Community Wireless Network, and one of the most visible, we believe that our work has paved the way for an entire movement of people. We have generated a significant amount of press (and still do), which has led to many people learning about Community Wireless, and the possibilities of public Wi-Fi. We also work with other organizations around the country, like Free Press and the Consumer’s Union to promote awareness and deployment of affordable wireless broadband in local communities. Some of our work in New York City has involved bringing free Wi-Fi to underprivileged and underserved residents.

What do you think of our idea of trying to provide a similar service to the working public of Singapore?

We whole-heartedly support and encourage you to undertake this project. We would be happy to help you in any way we can. We also encourage you to make use of all of the wonderful Open Source tools created by Community Wireless Groups around the world, from CUWiN’s (Urbana, Illinois, USA) wireless mesh software, to IleSansFil’s (Montreal, Canada) WifiDog Hotspot portal management system, to our (NYCwireless) Pebble Linux hotspot operating system, to Freifunk.net’s (Berlin, Germany) Freifunk Firmware for the Linksys WRT54G.

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