Those discussions have fallen apart, and now Earthlink has notified customers that its decomissioning the network entirely, and removing all of the equipment.

So the poster-child of Muni-wireless is now back at square one.

Josh Breitbart has good coverage about the happenings in Philadelphia, and through New America Foundation released an excellent report on the subject, “The Philadelphia Story: Learning from a Municipal Wireless Pioneer”.

What does this say about muni-wireless in general?

Certainly, Philadelphians will need to find alternative broadband options, and the free public-space hotspots will be going away, taking away a valuable public resource for the city.

But the single most important lesson from this experience is that single-source solutions for muni-networks are a bad idea. If Wireless Philadelphia followed their founding purpose instead of being tempted into a devil’s bargain with Earthlink to hand over the entirety of the network to the company, the story today would be very different. Wireless Philadelphia, which would have owned the network and contracted out its building and operations, would merely need to find a new partner to take over those roles. The city’s network would continue on, and users would have experienced few, if any, hiccups in service.

Instead, the network will now be disassembled and all of the work done over the past few years by the non-profit was for naught. People currently using the network (including a number of low-income families) will be left without a broadband connection, and Wireless Philadelphia will have to go back to the drawing board and come up with an alternative solution for bridging the digital divide, a process that will likely take months, if not years.

Contrast Philadelphia with Boston’s approach. In an insightful report, the Boston Wireless Task Force sketched out a plan for creating 2 competitive marketplaces that will drive the creation of the city-wide muni-wireless network. On one side, a number of infrastructure providers will all provide last mile networks, each within a different part of the city. Those networks will all wind up funnelling thorugh an network exchange managed by the Wireless Boston non-profit. On the other side, ISPs (and any other organization) will be able to purchase transport on the last-mile wireless network at competitive prices, and provide customers with a choice of companies from which to purchase retail wireless ISP service. Enabling all of this interconnectivity are standards-based hardware and software interfaces, and common routing and management interfaces.

In Boston, if an infrastructure provider exists the business, another company can step in an take over the operations of that part of the network—one that is likely already providing service in another part of the city. If an ISP decides to stop reselling the wireless network, there will be other ISPs who can provide service.

Looking back, its hard to miss the fact that Philadelphia chose the worst path. They had the option, early on, of taking a more Boston-like approach, but instead opted for a short term political win at the expense of a lasting solution. In reality, Philadelphia’s muni-wireless network, if they choose to rebuild it, will likely cost even more than it would have if they took a more progressive approach from the beginning. And its not lost on anyone that Philadelphia’s Wireless Task Force recommended a more competitive and holistic approach similar to (though different in certain ways) Wireless Boston’s current approach.

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NYCwireless and many other community wireless groups also use WifiDog, a hotspot management system from Ile Sans Fil, the Montréal, Canada wireless group.

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Here are some excerpts from my interview:

...

Dana Spiegel, executive director of NYCwireless, is skeptical of the deal’s impact, seeing it as little more than a public-relations move for both companies. Fon’s network, he says, is “to be perfectly blunt, tiny” and predominantly residential, making it not particularly valuable in public places. Ms. Rees says Fon has 60,000 Foneros in the U.S., though she acknowledges that Fon may not have the visibility of, say, T-Mobile with its Starbucks locations. While she maintains Fon’s footprint will be more effective over the long term, “over the short term we have to be strategic.” An example of that strategy: a “Fonbucks” campaign in which Fon has given away free La Foneras to people living near coffee shops.

Mr. Spiegel calls Time Warner Cable’s deal with Fon “a parasitic billing system … I’m paying the same amount of money for less service and Time Warner Cable is getting more money from what I’ve already paid for.” His volunteer group’s members create free hot spots in New York City parks and public spaces and help bring free wireless Net access to underserved communities. In his view, NYCwireless’s approach is better: “Instead of taking a reduction in my value and handing it back to Time Warner, I’m taking that value and spreading it out among my local community.”

Then there are efforts by cities and towns to offer cheap or free Wi-Fi. The most celebrated such efforts are taking shape in Philadelphia and San Francisco, but many other cities and towns are pursuing that goal, motivated by a desire to bridge the “digital divide” between rich and poor and eagerness to bill themselves as tech-friendly.

One thing Mr. Spiegel and Ms. Rees seem to agree on: It’s too simplistic to see muni Wi-Fi as a threat to the aspirations of big ISPs and other wireless providers. Rather, muni Wi-Fi is likely to be complementary to such efforts. “What municipal offerings do is raise the baseline,” Mr. Spiegel says, contending that such services will primarily convert those left behind today. “Today’s baseline is dial-up. When municipal networks roll out, you’ll see a move from dial-up” up to a new baseline.

...

“When first introduced, [air-conditioning] was a luxury item,” Mr. Spiegel notes. “Stores that installed it saw a benefit. As it became more available, more and more stores added it and it became more of a cost of doing business.”

So it will be with wireless. And as with air-conditioning, we’ll be startled to find ourselves going without now and again. We’ll even feel nostalgic about it.

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WHRB Wireless in Cambridge

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Here’s a great photo of our side trip to see SoCalFreeNet’s network installation. Mike Mee took us up onto the roof of one of the buildings his group lit up.

You can find more photos on flickr, thanks to Matt Westervelt.

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Barbara Bloemink, Curatorial Director, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and Colleen Macklin, Design Department Chair, Parsons The New School for Design, the other judges for the icon contest, sat and discussed the many creative submissions for hours on end. The choice was difficult. We thought about lots of different directions, from showcasing the “free” part to of community wireless networks, to the internet connectivity that such networks usually provide, to the community engagement and development that generally lives at the core of such groups, to the ubiquitous nature of most municipal wireless efforts. We even had discussions about the nature of the design language that we wanted to promote with the icon choice so that when given to the community, the icon can be developed and take on a number of descriptive roles.

In the end, because of how such community and municipal networks are expanding across the world, especially in developing countries, and because we didn’t want to constrain the iconography to a single language (English), we chose a simple globe with the ubiquitous radiating signal lines. The design is both easy to understand (these networks connect us to each other throughout the world) and universal (at least, we believe that a “globe” is mostly understood as representing the Earth), and should be able to be used across the myriad community and municipal networks around the world.

The winning design was submitted by Val Frixione from Los Angeles, CA:

Val says, “A wireless hot spot is like a digital oasis that enables us to connect to the world. This is the main concept behind the proposed design: the depiction of planet earth offering a wireless connection to those who need one.”

One of the interesting extensions that we finished our day discussing was the concept of locality that is a basis of most community networks. Though people understand that the internet a universal and world-wide tool, community networks are local creations, reflecting the needs and structures of local communities. For example, in New York City, our community wireless networks are based in parks and public spaces, since that’s where so many residents and visitors spend their time. Compare that to Montreal (home of Ile Sans Fil), where the culture (and weather in the winter) drive many indoors to cafes, or to Champaign-Urbana (home of CUWiN), where lack of choice and affordability of internet access has driven a suburban and rural community to develop a mesh network that grows from house to house.

In order to reflect the different types of local structures and venues, one of the first iconographic extensions I’d like to see is the creation of supplemental icons, like coffee cups, buildings, trees, houses, and so on that can be used to indicate the type of nodes that are available on the network. Such icons can appear on the node profiles and maps.

Continuing in this local context, additional icons that reflect the capabilities and content of each local node should also be developed. For example, for the urban style hotspots in New York, Montreal, and many other cities, we can have supplemental icons that indicate there’s local content, music, art, and commerce that is available at that location through the hotspot.

There are lots of other ideas that are possible. We’ll be starting to develop some of them, and others should make use of the icons and come up with other ideas as well.

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