[MLB-WIRELESS] FW: [ptp-general] Activists Bring the Digital Frontier to NewCommunities

[Dan Flett]

A rather long but interesting article posted on the PersonalTelco list.

-----Original Message-----
From: general-bounces at lists.personaltelco.net
[mailto:general-bounces at lists.personaltelco.net] On Behalf Of Darrin
Eden
Sent: Tuesday, 4 January 2005 10:31
To: general at personaltelco.net
Subject: [ptp-general] Activists Bring the Digital Frontier to
NewCommunities

Activists Bring the Digital Frontier to New Communities
(Part 2 of 2)
by Michelle Chen
January 2, 2005

<http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Chen0102-2.htm>

A laptop and an antenna might not signify political activism to most, 
but in the Digital Age, they might soon become indispensable vehicles 
for social change.

With the rapid growth of wireless internet technology since the 1990s, 
the allure of using unlicensed airwaves to enable widespread high-speed 
internet access has created new alliances and new tensions among 
grassroots nonprofit organizations, government agencies and 
corporations, all of which have a stake in developing wireless 
technology, or "WiFi." Wireless networking -- which allows for 
decentralized, sharable internet connectivity at low or no cost to the 
user -- has the potential to connect millions to the internet -- even 
remote and poor populations. This is an empowering prospect for 
community organizations and corporations alike. And where there is 
power, a struggle is never far behind.

Resisting the tide of corporate consolidation in the communications 
industries, noncommercial, grassroots networking initiatives have 
managed to flourish in recent years. Networking activists take diverse 
approaches to connecting their communities. While some prefer to remain 
small and view citywide network grand plans with skepticism, others 
seek to forge a triumvirate of government, nonprofit and corporate 
resources. Some see great opportunity in partnering with behemoth 
telecommunication companies while others take a more anarchistic 
approach, building networks with second-hand machinery and homemade 
software.

The power of the broadband access movement, activists say, is in the 
fluidity and flexibility of their projects. Community networks run on 
volunteers and donations, and grow only as big as their constituencies 
demand.

In his analysis of the public interest in an open internet, Mark 
Cooper, director of research of the Consumer Federation of America, 
called this low-key approach a "robust network" model, which ensures 
"rapid and efficient technological innovation" through localized "open 
architecture." Simply put: leave it alone and it will take care of 
itself.

For the Portland-based nonprofit networking group Personal Telco, 
working digital democracy magic on local neighborhoods grows from a 
natural desire for "improving quality of life." The group's president, 
Darrin Edin, reflected, "We just assume that internet access is the 
baseline to be a productive member of society."

Personal Telco (PT) has set up over 100 wireless access points in small 
businesses and public spaces across Portland. Anyone within range of 
these "nodes" or "hotspots" who has a wireless card in their computer 
can connect to the internet. PT is now working to penetrate residential 
neighborhoods through grant-funded networking projects. The goal 
driving their work is to impart both the hardware infrastructure and 
the technological know-how to make networks self-sustaining, "so that 
each neighborhood [project] is driven by the people that actually live 
there," said Edin.

All of the computers, equipment and service plans PT has provided have 
been contributed by public and private entities, including the city 
government and corporations like computer processor giant Intel. "From 
end to end," said Edin, no consumer "spends a dime on this thing. It is 
all donation-driven."

Edin is confident that consumers and the technology itself are flexible 
enough to circumnavigate monopolies. "Smarter," more sophisticated 
access technology will allow for more efficient sharing of frequencies 
and decreased reliance on cable and telephone connections. "The grand 
vision 
 is to effectively connect all these wireless access points 
together," he said, "eventually forming a citywide network that never 
touches copper or cable."

Grassroots Networks Confront Big Brother and Big Business

Noting recent initiatives taken by some municipalities to establish 
public internet services, some grassroots networkers warn that just as 
big business should not meddle with the growth of community networks, 
neither should government.

Ben Serebin, director of the community internet project NYC Wireless, 
contends that since there is currently "no business model that's been 
successful with WiFi [for] commercial, citywide deployment," it is 
"highly unlikely" that a municipal government could devise a 
cost-effective plan. As long as hotspots in parks and cafés offer free 
services, the demand for fee-charging wireless internet access will 
wane, whether it is government-run or corporate. Moreover, Serebin 
questions whether WiFi is really the government's domain: "Why would we 
want our taxpayers' money just to replace an [internet service 
provider]?" he asked. "It's not like we get electricity for free."

Similarly, Matt Smith, founder of Atlanta FreeNet, a volunteer-run 
networking group, suspects that Atlanta's municipal network, launched 
earlier this month, will actually limit people's choice of service and 
may not even be financially sustainable. Known as FastPass, the Atlanta 
project is a joint venture between local government and Biltmore 
Communications, one of the area's major wireless broadband providers, 
and will provide low-cost service plans for public hotspots. Smith 
predicts that most fee-charging wireless services will find themselves 
unable to compete with the spread of free hotspots in cafés and outdoor 
recreational areas, and the government's scheme faces the same fate: 
"Nobody's going to turn down free access if it works."

Since their launch in 2001, Atlanta FreeNet has gradually cultivated an 
alternative network by helping businesses and groups set up public 
hotspots and educating local communities about the benefits of WiFi.

In Smith's view, without government help, the market can "fix itself, 
and not to the benefit of the companies trying to make a buck." His 
group offers a more flexible "amenity model," which starts with a 
baseline of free internet access, but individual access points within 
the network are free to offer fee-based premium features to users, like 
better connection quality or the option of making internet calls via 
mobile phone. In a café, for example, WiFi would be an extra perk that 
would simultaneously help sell coffee and promote a host of wireless 
services in the time it takes to down a latte.

In Texas, the nonprofit Austin Wireless City takes a more proactive 
approach to engaging both the commercial and political establishments. 
By setting up free hotspots around the city, the group acts as a 
facilitator, connecting local groups to government representatives and 
corporate service providers. "We kind of diffuse the natural suspicions 
that they have of each other," said the organization's president, Rich 
MacKinnon.

Both the Austin Wireless City and Atlanta FreeNet have created 
self-sustaining networks in which each hotspot proprietor pays for its 
own service, which is then offered free to individuals. The economy of 
scale ensures that "costs are divided a hundred different ways," said 
MacKinnon.

Crossing the Digital Divide

Still, while local hangouts and bookstores may benefit from the 
cost-sharing plans managed by non-profit ventures, much of the lower 
economic stratum of society remains literally out of WiFi's range. The 
proprietor-driven model promoted by groups like Austin Wireless City 
runs on market incentives, catering primarily to enterprises for which 
launching a public node, or wireless access point, is a financial 
investment.

So, although a local café can offer WiFi "on the house" to lure 
laptop-toters away from the rival franchise that charges customers to 
check their email, a community center in a low-income neighborhood will 
not have much demand for this kind of traffic. Consequently, 
commerce-oriented community wireless ventures have yet to make an 
impact in places where wireless access is not viewed as a trendy way to 
stimulate local business.

MacKinnon of Austin Wireless City said that although his group is 
working on expanding the scope of their network, poorer communities 
simply lack the resources to set up high-speed connections. While the 
costs of computer hardware are less of a problem because of the wide 
availability of hardware donation services, it is difficult to persuade 
struggling low-income housing residents to collectively "pledge to pay 
a 30- to 50-dollar broadband bill every month," MacKinnon said. "Those 
venues are in need of funds."

A few years into the wireless revolution, community groups have 
observed that the spectrum free-for-all has left the distribution of 
benefits in flux. Low-income communities still struggle with the 
Digital Divide between networked haves and technologically barren 
have-nots.

According to the household surveys of the Pew Internet & American Life 
Project, about one in five adults with less than a high school 
education are connected to the internet, compared with more than eight 
in ten college-educated Americans. While 43 percent of people with 
household incomes of less than $30,000 per year use the internet, 84 
percent of households making more than $75,000 are online. According to 
the latest Pew survey, a significantly higher percentage of whites 
reported going online compared to blacks and Hispanics.

But once underserved groups do gain internet access, the impact is 
noticeable. A 2003 analysis by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing 
Studies revealed that internet access projects in low-income 
communities led to quantifiable improvements in local quality of life, 
education and employment.

Recognizing the potential of broadband and wireless to help shrink the 
Digital Divide, nonprofits are working to deploy comprehensive 
high-speed networks that penetrate into areas lacking even basic 
dial-up access.

A national nonprofit organization called One Economy is installing 
high-speed connections in affordable housing complexes in eight cities, 
from San Jose to Washington, DC, and aims to network 5,000 households 
by the end of 2005. The organization emerged from the public housing 
advocacy movement and founded its networking mission on the idea that 
low-income housing is a vital laboratory for exploring ways of 
integrating economically disenfranchised people into an increasingly 
technology-based society.

Vice President of Program Services Mark Levine said that One Economy's 
network infrastructure relies on a mix of fiber-optic connections 
within buildings and wireless connections between buildings, allowing 
"every household [to] share that access, which gets the price down for 
a family to a fraction of what it is on the market."

As a content provider, One Economy provides its clients with a 
multi-lingual web portal called The Beehive, a national networking 
service One Economy says is used by some 500,000 visitors each month, 
connecting to online resources ranging from personal finance advice to 
homework help. The residents have taken rapidly to the services, said 
Levine, which "points to the power of what low-income people do once 
they get online. They can do a lot more than just chat rooms and 
download music."

Most of One Economy's projects lack the bells and whistles of the 
coffee shop circuit. Vice President of Access Services Dave McConnell 
has observed that "most affordable housing organizations are looking 
for the simplest, the sturdiest, and the least expensive solution" -- 
and WiFi's limited indoor range of 100 to 300 feet per antenna makes it 
less viable for apartment complexes. Currently, about 10 percent of One 
Economy's projects utilize WiFi technology, mostly thanks to hardware 
donations from Cisco Systems, but this proportion is expected to grow 
over the next few years. McConnell added that as the technology becomes 
more widespread, "wireless applications will be touching a lot of 
affordable housing."

Unlike free-spectrum activists seeking to bust telecommunications 
monopolies, One Economy is not opposed to corporate partnerships if 
they facilitate important projects. The organization has attracted 
high-profile sponsors like Intel and Verizon by offering new marketing 
opportunities with a philanthropic sheen. But one limitation is that 
the feasibility of WiFi in affordable housing depends largely on 
corporate generosity. "We're involved in over 100 projects right now," 
said McConnell, "and I know I can't get a Cisco donation in every one."

Until nonprofits like One Economy have the financial backing to delve 
into WiFi independent of corporate benefactors, their efforts to plug 
the Digital Divide will assume priority over the broader policy debates 
that consumer advocates have taken on. "We're agnostic about what the 
ultimate internet provider is," said Levine. "We just want to get the 
buildings wired up."

But there are signs of convergence between the economic justice issues 
of internet access and the grassroots networking movement. SoCal 
FreeNet emerged last year in San Diego, California as one of the rare 
WiFi initiatives that focus on both low-income community broadband and 
grassroots, minimally-commercial networking.

Using recycled computers and sharing a few connections to an 
independent access provider, SoCal FreeNet volunteers have been scaling 
walls and running cable over rooftops to install low-cost networks in 
San Diego neighborhoods. Volunteers recently provided WiFi access to 
more than 140 apartments and surrounding areas in Barrio Logan, an 
impoverished, largely black and Hispanic enclave.

Vice President of Research and Project Management Michael Mee said that 
political clashes like the conflict between municipal authorities and 
Verizon in Philadelphia (see Part 1 of this series) would not hinder 
their ventures. "We're below the radar of most of that stuff at the 
moment," he explained, having cornered a market that for now seems 
unprofitable to corporations. Because SoCal FreeNet's target clientele 
lacks both money and infrastructure for premium broadband service, said 
Mee, "the telcos aren't interested in serving them, anyway."

The demand for wireless services generated by nonprofit groups 
representing local communities has been overwhelming. "We've got our 
finger in the dyke right now," said Mee. "If we wanted to, we could 
easily be completely overwhelmed with wireless work for nonprofits."

But Mee acknowledged a disconnect -- albeit a shrinking one -- between 
the explosion of wireless technology and efforts to narrow the Digital 
Divide. To build up credibility and skills as an organization, Mee said 
FreeNet volunteers must supplement their housing work by networking 
with local coffeeshops catering to gadget-laden hipsters. Advocates for 
low-income access argue that the group's energies would be better spent 
on communities that lack even basic internet connections. Mee recalled 
an email from a community group complaining that grassroots networkers 
like FreeNet's team are focusing too much on "running around providing 
wireless to yuppies with laptops" instead of communities totally devoid 
of any network infrastructure.

Mee is optimistic that as high-end public spaces become saturated with 
WiFi, the trend will be to move into "communities that will really 
benefit." These populations in turn are beginning to advocate for their 
technological needs. The community-based nonprofit sector, in his view, 
"is only discovering
 this whole other world."

Community networks may have the greatest effect on rural areas, where 
internet usage is lower than in cities and suburbs. The La Cañada 
Wireless Association (LCWA), a WiFi cooperative serving 75 households 
in isolated New Mexico communities, has evolved in its two-year history 
into both a full-scale professional wireless service and an experiment 
in community empowerment. Starting up with a $5,000 capital investment, 
the cooperative has pooled funds to purchase high-speed T-1 lines that 
can connect up to 40 computers to the internet, and volunteers provide 
installation services.

Members are inspired to share both cost and revenue communally, said 
founder Bob Knight: "Rather than supporting a large corporate entity, 
they're basically supporting themselves." The local cable company's 
refusal to allow line-sharing on its high-speed connections -- whereby 
more than one household could use the same account -- also 
inadvertently magnifies the appeal of LCWA's no-frills service, which 
offers lower prices and better connections.

As a cooperative, LCWA generally avoids bureaucracies, corporate or 
political. The most interaction they have had with local authorities 
occurred when the state Attorney General's office investigated the 
group's nonprofit status -- right after a major cable company tried to 
break into the local market and failed. Happy with their modest but 
steady progress, the coop plans to expand into households that are not 
even connected to the region's electricity grid, bringing wireless 
internet to homes that have never known wire.

In Illinois, the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network's (CUWiN) 
strategy is to create a macro-network of access points and combine it 
with new software applications that not only bring the internet to 
residents, but create a kind of local intranet as well. When CUWiN's 
pilot projects are officially launched in early 2005, community members 
will be able to broadcast live streaming audio and video from local 
venues, instantly download news from the Urbana-Champaign Independent 
Media Center, and log on to Chambana.net, a homegrown hosting service 
that will run over one hundred local websites and email lists.

Recognizing that mere connectivity is not enough, the grant-funded 
CUWiN project aims to close the technology gap through education, 
making community members stewards of their own communications 
infrastructure. "The best training models," noted Sascha Meinrath, 
CUWiN's president, "are really to just give the resources to people -- 
you know, let them figure out what best fits their personal needs."

Who Will Claim the Wireless Frontier?

The question of WiFi's manifest destiny centers on if and how wireless 
connectivity will wind up in the hands of the people who need it most. 
The coming months will bring pivotal political debates on how to 
regulate, or deregulate, the future of internet communications.

The longstanding framework for national spectrum policy has been based 
on the distribution of supposedly "scarce" bandwidth among public and 
private interests, like television networks, radio stations and the 
military. But according to Meinrath, more efficient wireless 
technologies have rendered this "incredibly wasteful," industry-backed 
paradigm obsolete. "Our policies are decades behind our technologies," 
he said, "and we're really suffering for it."

Yet recent actions on the federal and state levels show that 
policymakers are beginning to tune in to the potential of technological 
advances and listen to the demands of community wireless advocates. As 
a national organization, One Economy has helped pass legislation in 20 
states and Washington, DC to pre-wire new affordable housing projects 
for high-speed access. This year, the Media Access Project and the New 
America Foundation have been successfully lobbying the FCC for the 
liberation of underused analog television spectrum for wireless 
services, which would greatly expand the range of wireless networks.

Experts also foresee WiFi technology growing increasingly sophisticated 
in coming years. A new technology called WiMax, promoted by Intel, 
could boost the range of a network to as far as 30 miles. Though the 
system has yet to be implemented on a large scale, tech industry 
watchers are hailing it as a potential watershed in extending wireless 
coverage across the globe.

But activists stress that industry heavyweights only welcome innovation 
that they can sell. Companies typically protect their products through 
intellectual property rules and software encoding that prevents 
tinkering, leaving grassroots developers "stymied in terms of creating 
new functions" for equipment, said Meinrath. CUWiN's tech team is 
currently working to "reverse engineer" commercial hardware, unraveling 
the protections built into products to tailor them for the local 
network.

Whether the next big thing in WiFi is the handiwork of hackers or 
corporate strategists, the general movement seems to be toward "ad hoc" 
or "mesh" networking, which minimizes or eliminates the role of 
hardwired phone and cable systems that currently serve as the 
"backbone" for most wireless networks. The components of a mesh network 
are mainly its interlinked users -- as signals ricochet through a 
"dynamic" web of mobile devices. An ad-hoc network is in its purest 
form totally amorphous, with essentially no stationary base at all, and 
grows organically, like a digital fungus.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen, a researcher with the Disruptive Design Team at 
Trinity College in Ireland, said this decentralized format is 
"something that the mobile phone companies and the big telecoms hate," 
since it "gets rid of all of their towers, because the people 
themselves become the nodes."

The new waves in technology and policy serve only to feed the primary 
current driving the growth of wireless networking: the momentum of 
people power. As Jeffrey Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy 
said, "you can't put the digital genie back in the bottle." Across 
cultural, economic and demographic spectrums, different groups are 
discovering a common wavelength, redefining community for the 
Information Age.-- 
The Personal Telco Project - http://www.personaltelco.net/
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