Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

Then Wi-Fi arrived. Its name a marketing trick borrowed from “hi-fi” audio, Wi-Fi was the result of a visionary decision in 1985 by the Federal Communications Commission to free up a tiny portion of the radio spectrum for experimental use without the need for licenses. For years afterwards, those bands were used primarily by garage-door openers and cordless phones because they were prone to interference by stray radiation from microwave ovens. Engineers called these frequencies the “junk spectrum.” But by the mid-1990s, a new generation of cheap and powerful digital signal processing chips was under development. They would power advanced radios that could turn junk spectrum into a broadband bonanza. Wi-Fi used this new computational power and a frequency-hopping technique called “spread- spectrum,” originally devised for torpedo guidance during World War II by actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil, to simply weave its signals around any interference. The result was that computers could now shove almost as much data across the public airwaves as they could over a wire, with no subscription fees. Wireless local area network (WLAN) systems had existed in offices and warehouses for years, but every manufacturer used a different standard. When the universal Wi-Fi standard known as IEEE 802.1 lb was finalized in 1999, the market coalesced quickly. Apple popularized the technology with consumers through its AirPort line of base stations and receivers, and manufacturing economies of scale kicked in. For a few hundred dollars, you could light up a bubble of connectivity in an afternoon.

Within the laissez-faire wilds of the unlicensed bands, there were still a few rules that severely limited Wi-Fis usefulness. You couldn’t just turn up the signal and blanket a whole neighborhood, for instance. Wi-Fi devices were limited to just one watt of broadcast power, making its range perfectly scaled for the indoor spaces we inhabit every day. Indeed, the standard was designed for these settings. But the faint signals didn’t reach far enough to make it useful in outdoor situations. In the suburbs at least, Wi-Fi wouldn’t even get your bits to the other side of the parking lot.

The first attempts to hack around Wi-Fi’s limited range started on rooftops. History was repeating itself. In the summer of 1901, radio pioneer Lee de Forest had tested one of the first wireless telegraphs on the rooftops of the Lakota Hotel and the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Auditorium in Chicago, where he was a professor.24 A century later, a whole new generation of radio geeks once again climbed ladders to beam bandwidth across cities and towns. Almost as soon as Wi-Fi hit the streets, they developed hacks to concentrate the limited transmission power into focused radio beams that could stretch over longer distances.

They replaced the stock omnidirectional antennas, which spread that energy every which way, with directional “sector” and “Yagi” designs that concentrated the signal into a narrower stream like a nozzle on a garden hose. (One homebrew range-extending design, the “Cantenna,” could be constructed from $6.45 worth of parts, including an empty can of Pringles chips. ~) They mounted these arrays on rooftops in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and London, and linked them up into wireless backbone networks, communications grids that stretched across entire metropolitan areas, free of airtime charges and independent of the existing telecommunications grid.

In New York, clusters of tall buildings blocked long-distance wireless shots. But NYCwireless had a different use for outdoor Wi-Fi. That same density meant a single low-power Wi-Fi hot spot could cover any one of Manhattan’s small but bustling parks and plazas or even a cluster of apartments. After reading in Salon , an online magazine, about someone in San Francisco who lit up the bench in front of their favorite cafe, I realized this could be done all over New York City. In the midst of writing my doctoral dissertation on the large-scale geography of the Internet, I turned to approach the problem from the other end. How could we use Wi-Fi to bridge those last few hundred feet from a DSL endpoint to citizens living, working, and playing in the city’s public spaces? I posted a note on the website of Seattle Wireless, which had become a central gathering point for would-be wireless communities around the world. Within days Schmidt and a handful of others had e-mailed me, and we made plans to meet in person.

The first NYCwireless gathering was held in 2001, by sheer coincidence on the left wing’s high holy day—May 1, International Workers’ Day. Lacking a clubhouse of our own, and with all of us living in tiny Manhattan studio apartments (mine was just 275 square feet), we gathered at a Starbucks on Manhattan’s Union Square. In a foreshadowing of his knack for city hacks, Schmidt had launched a crash effort in the preceding week to get NYCwireless’s first hot spot up and running in time for our meeting. Using a custom bit he had fabricated especially for the task (and brought to the meeting for show-and-tell), Schmidt had drilled through 18 inches of masonry to string an Ethernet cable from his Upper East Side apartment to a wireless router he lent to the coffee shop in the building next door. As he told a CNN reporter a few weeks later, what motivated his home renovation was common generosity, “I’ve got more bandwidth than I’m using and I’m willing to share it for free.”

From that humble start, over the next year we perfected a guerrilla model for setting up free Wi-Fi: donated equipment, volunteer labor, and a host who would cover bandwidth costs and provide a space for our equipment. We hung wireless routers outside our own apartment windows and on the fronts of local businesses like alt.coffee, a cafe fronting Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.

Almost immediately, we found ourselves in a digital land rush. As it turns out, we weren’t the only ones looking to bring Wi-Fi to the street. But we were the only ones hoping to do so for free. All of the big wireless companies like Verizon and T-Mobile, as well as start-ups such as Boingo, wanted to muscle in and turned our public spaces into a commercial battleground. As we worried that Wi-Fi’s wireless commons would be colonized by business, our fears were confirmed when, in December 2002, AT&T, Intel, and IBM teamed up to launch Cometa Networks, a new venture that promised to build a network of 20,000 pay hot spots nationwide. At NYCwireless we shifted strategy, identifying the most important public spaces and “squatting” with our own DIY wireless infrastructure—the idea being that no pay hot spot would make a dime there if a free alternative were already in place. But as industry mobilized we realized that we needed to move beyond guerrilla tactics. We needed more partners that could pay for bandwidth and give us a place to mount our antennas. The big breakthrough came when Marcos Lara, one of NYCwireless’s cofounders, picked up the phone and called the people who ran Bryant Park.

Visit midtown Manhattan today, and nestled behind the magnificent Beaux-Arts monolith of the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, you will find one of the most vibrant public spaces in any city in the world. On a sunny spring day, Bryant Park bustles with office workers lunching and lounging, and in the winter a full-scale ice-skating rink sprouts from the lawn. But in the 1980s, like many of New Yorks commercial areas, the park had deteriorated into a den of drug dealing and prostitution. Beginning in 1988, the park underwent an extensive renovation headed by the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation (BPRC) that reinvented it as a living room for midtown. BPRC was one of the first business improvement districts formed in New York in the 1980s, a kind of quasi-governmental neighborhood organization funded by commercial property owners to counteract the cutbacks in police patrols and sanitation services during the municipal austerity of the day.