Category Archives: USIW

Minneapolis Unwired: Dead zones & IOUs (plus a Wi-Fi in the parks update)

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Steve Alexander has a report on the Minneapolis Wi-Fi deployment at the Star Tribune. Judging from the dates on the comments, I think it’s from May 26 but there’s no dateline on the story.

The gist is that it’s not done which is also the ongoing mantra. “It’s always something” as Gilda would say. Prospect Park is still a “challenge” area and there are others around the metro–a total of three square miles still unwired. The park issue I reported on before seems to be resolved and a contract is in place with a bit of money changing hands from US Internet to the Park Board. (Read details over at the eDemocracy Forum).

The City of Minneapolis is using only $50,000 worth of services but paying $1.25 million per year. The article says the money carries over (an IOU so to speak) so supposedly we will get full value eventually. Some reasons we aren’t getting full value now are because the network needs to actually be complete before Police and Fire will mess with it and because some City departments are slow in adopting the service.

Alexander talks about using the network to track video from a police car going 80mph. I would love to know how that is possible. I don’t think the current network, in areas where it is fully implemented, allows you to smoothly travel from node to node in a car without losing the connection some of the time. So do we have a “special” high-speed backend network for police and fire? I know there is a “public safety” channel or something but if it’s still in the Wi-Fi range, it would be subject to all kinds of interference.

US Internet meanwhile says they now have 14,000 subscribers. Those numbers should eventually translate to cash infusions in the City’s Digital Inclusion Fund with a minimum of 5% of net pretax income. The fund has $100,000 left of the initial $500,000 from US Internet. The fund and the money are part of the Community Benefits Agreement in the contract. I’m on the Digital Inclusion Fund Committee and so far we have not heard when we will receive more money and we have postponed this years grant-making cycle.

We are still the muni-wi-fi poster child of the world. It’s working here because the City of Minneapolis signed on as anchor tenant and is paying a hefty fee to support a network. However, unless the City starts to get its money’s worth of services soon, we may have rethink this poster child status.

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Minneapolis Unwired: Digital Inclusion Update

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I am a community representative on the Digital Inclusion Fund Advisory Committee and if you drop by often you may have read this article when we were looking for proposals for our very first funding cycle.

I now have forty-five proposals to go through requesting far more than the $200,000 that’s available for grants. I think there will be some interesting projects coming along in the next year to help low income and marginalized folk in Minneapolis get to the Internet. Not much more I can say until an official announcement some time before the end of the year.

I can announce our members though. I was shy about that previously as there was no listing available on the web until recently. I planned to check with my colleagues about listing names here after reading Josh Breitbart’s post pointing out that we aren’t identified anywhere. That has changed and the official list of reps is up at the Digital Access site. (Thanks, Josh. I have a feeling your blog post helped in getting this information out there.)

Read Josh’s post. His ideas around horizontal collaboration vs. hub-and-spoke deserve serious discussion. He likes much of what he sees in Minneapolis compared to Philadelphia. But we are still in the development stage, now creating the reality of the shared vision. What is disheartening for me is the minuscule information about the Wi-Fi project itself and the walled/civic garden portals. (I am supposed to be on a committee that is planning the community portals and it hasn’t met in months.) The deployment is a month or more behind schedule and I doubt if the network will be completed before 2008. I think delays are to be expected in new ventures like this but US Internet Wireless (USIW) and the City of Minneapolis have not been forthcoming in updating residents as to status. There is a city-sponsored mailing list but little flows through it and there has never been any type of status report even when new neighborhoods are added to the Wi-Fi mix.

USIW and Minneapolis need the community to rally round the Wi-Fi system. Frequent and honest communication is the best way to ensure that engagement.

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Minneapolis Unwired: ZDNet article covers USIW response to bridge collapse

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Marguerite Reardon at ZDNet has an Aug. 8 piece on the US Internet Wireless (USIW) response to the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis (just surfaced in my Google Alerts). It’s the standard blow-by-blow about USIW’s quick and strategic response to the crisis plus how public safety is a major reason for muni Wi-Fi.

Citywide Wi-Fi network put to test in Minneapolis

Part of the USIW response was the opening of the subscription-based Wi-Fi network to allow use by anyone. This was announced via local broadcast media. With the cellular network flooded, USIW hoped people with Wi-Fi enabled smart phones could use Wi-Fi for placing calls. Most articles then give usage statistics provided by Joe Caldwell, CEO of USIW: network use jumped from 1,000 registered users to 6,000 users. The inference is that lots of phone calls were placed over Wi-Fi (Voice over IP or VOIP).

Reardon is the only writer who took the figures to task:

Exactly how many of those 6,000 users were actually using the Wi-Fi network in lieu of the cell phone network isn’t known. It’s unlikely that many people were able to use the network for voice communications, given that most cell phones don’t have Wi-Fi capability and those that do may not be able use voice over IP clients.

Additionally, a large number of VOIP calls would have degraded services on the Wi-Fi network as surely as it did on the cellular network. I assume USIW could share usage data with us showing how many VOIP calls were placed and what other types of activities were going on.

Also interesting to note is that text and instant messages were still moving over the cell network. (Jon Gordon mentioned this to me via Twitter.) I see this as an education issue with cell phone users needing to know how to send text messages and that this is an alternative when you are unable to place a voice call. Most of my (older) friends—even those who have had cell phones a long time—don’t know how to text message or IM on their cell.

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