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

Philadelphia’s love affair with Wi-Fi quickly turned sour. “Everything that the project had going for it, turned against it,” Goldman laments. Street’s administration was hamstrung by corruption scandals that led to increased criticism of all his initiatives. EarthLink, in a desperate bid for survival as its dial-up business collapsed, took on too many wireless projects in other cities. Work on the Philadelphia project slowed to a crawl. In early 2007 the company was thrown into disarray by the sudden death of its longtime leader and CEO, Garry Betty.

Deployment challenges dogged the project at every turn. In Center City, Philadelphia’s gentrified urban core, historic-preservation regulations prohibited mounting the antennas on the district’s ornamental streetlights. The hilly, tree-lined streets of the city’s more affluent outlying neighborhoods were a wireless engineer’s nightmare. These complications left unserved the two enclaves where the city’s political power brokers lived. PECO Energy, a unit of the energy giant Exelon, owns Philadelphia’s light poles and charged steep rates for hosting the wireless modules. In Goldman’s words, the company “was very, very difficult. They took their money but they were not a partner.”

But Wi-Fi technology’s own limitations doomed Wireless Philadelphia in the end. As we saw in chapter 4, Wi-Fi was never designed for large-scale, seamless outdoor networks, let alone delivering broadband to building interiors. Goldman later confessed, “we bought EarthLink’s promises hook, line and sinker.” Around the United States, other communities were running into similar problems. Lompoc, California, a rural community of forty-two thousand, had installed citywide Wi-Fi as a revitalization strategy after cutbacks at a nearby military base. It soon discovered that wire mesh embedded in the town’s numerous stucco-sided homes blocked wireless signals from reaching devices inside.5 Goldman believes that Wi-Fi was the project’s Achilles’ heel in Philadelphia. “If the technology had worked fine, we would have been able to weather all of these other problems.” By 2008, the New York Times’s excitement had cooled. “Hopes for Wireless Cities Fade as Internet Providers Pull Out,” read the March 22, 2008 headline.6

While Philadelphia inspired many other cities to launch their own wireless initiatives, it also provoked a vicious response from telecommunications companies, setting back the prospects for municipal broadband throughout the United States. Horrified by the prospect of competing for customers with local governments, within months of Street’s ribbon cutting, the industry unleashed its counterattack. Verizon, the dominant local telephone company in the city, lobbied the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a law barring cities from charging any fees to recover the costs of building municipal broadband networks. In a last-minute compromise, Philadelphia was grandfathered in and allowed to complete its project. But it would be the last municipality in Pennsylvania to build a public broadband network.

Industry lobbyists fanned out across the country, and with Pennsylvania’s law as a template, succeeded in getting roadblocks passed in half of the nation’s states. At the time, Federal Trade Commissioner Jon Leibowitz, speaking at the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors conference, said, “imagine if Borders and Barnes & Noble, claiming it was killing their book sales, asked lawmakers to ban cities from building libraries. The legislators would laugh them out of the State House. Yet the same thing is happening right now with respect to Wi-Fi and other municipal broadband plans, and it is being taken all too seriously.”

The potent and effective industry backlash to Wireless Philadelphia means thousands of American communities are now restricted by state law from investing in their own future. And telecommunications companies continue to vigorously fight local efforts. In Colorado, a somewhat less restrictive bill passed in 2005 that permits municipalities to build broadband only after approval by a public referendum. In the city of Longmont, a cable industry-backed lobbying group called Look Before We Leap spent $300,000 on advertising to unsuccessfully stop a 2011 municipal referendum to fund a city-owned fiber-optic network.9 As Vince Jordan, who runs the project for Longmont’s electric power utility pointed out in a podcast soon after voters approved the measure, it was the most money ever spent on a local campaign in the 86,000-person city’s history.10

Goldman believes that it is unfair to depict Wireless Philadelphia as an utter failure. “This was a beta project for all that cities are trying to do today,” he says. Broadband prices in Philadelphia dropped immediately as soon as the project was announced, as they do everywhere that local governments enter the broadband market. Over two thousand low-income families received free laptops and discounted Internet service from the project’s digital inclusion initiative. The battle for Philadelphia also eventually provoked cable giant Comcast, whose corporate headquarters is one of the city’s largest employers, to roll out its own free Xfinity Wi-Fi service up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Since the company had a near-monopoly on cable television in its markets (the regional telephone giant Verizon’s own TV offerings were only slowly making inroads), this free perk for Comcast subscribers became a kind of de facto public Wi-Fi network.

In the end, Philadelphia did get its wireless network after all. Unable to make the business work in cities across the United States, in May 2008 EarthLink announced it was getting out of municipal wireless entirely and liquidated its assets in Philadelphia. Less than two years later, the city belatedly decided to buy the network back from a bankrupt holding company that had acquired it in 2008, after EarthLink had unsuccessfully tried to give it to the risk-averse city for free. The final cost, a mere $2 million.11 Philadelphia’s wireless network will now be repurposed for public safety and government operations, linking up video surveillance cameras and city workers’ handheld devices. After so much turmoil, it was a fire-sale bargain for the city. New York City, by comparison, spent a whopping $549 million building out its own public-safety wireless network, which costs more than $38 million a year just to operate.

Luckily, Philadelphia was able to salvage value from the debacle. In 2007, when the projects in Philadelphia and Lompoc were falling apart, I told a reporter from the Associated Press that municipal wireless networks “are the monorails of this decade: the wrong technology, totally overpromised and completely undelivered.”13 That was true, but the lessons of Philadelphia have led to more successful efforts in dozens of other communities around the United States. Communities that pursue Wi-Fi today, like Chattanooga, Tennessee, are doing it in a more systematic, targeted, and understated manner—and it is often an add-on to a more robust fiber-optic network rather than a substitute for wired connectivity. Which is good. Otherwise, they’re just legacy projects—like convention centers, casinos, and sports stadiums— for headline-grabbing mayors looking for easy wins.

Fishing for Apps

Chastened by the struggles to build municipal wireless networks and hampered by chronic budget shortfalls, many cities today are seeking less risky ways to experiment with smart technologies. In recent years a growing number have tapped software firms and freelance hackers in their own backyard, fishing for useful apps with government data and cash prizes as bait.

It all began in Washington, DC. The home to an increasingly dysfunctional national government, as a city Washington is still recovering from the calamitous reign of former mayor Marion Barry, who in the 1990s served six months in prison for crack possession between his third and fourth terms in office. In the last decade, however, the DC metro area has grown into one of the nation’s most important high-tech hubs, second only to Silicon Valley in total tech employment. While most of the jobs are in the suburbs, lots of young software engineers now live in the district’s gentrified neighborhoods around Dupont Circle and in Adams Morgan, working at start-ups, government agencies, and non-profits.