The City That Cut the Cord

By Lev Grossman

I rolled into Spokane, Wash., around 6 p.m. on a Tuesday. Spokane is one of those sleepy cities bursting with small-town pride--its residents will be glad to inform you, for example, that it's the smallest city ever to be host of a World's Fair--but it's a pretty quiet place on a Tuesday night. You can look both ways before you cross the street if you really want to, but it's just a formality. I sat on a park bench. A dude on the corner played the saxophone. Some punks on dirt bikes made fun of me. The silence was eerie. Zombie-movie eerie.

But there's a lot more going on here than meets the eye. Spokane is actually a radical experiment in urban wireless technology, a live-in laboratory where city-employed nerds are crash-testing the wireless technotopia of the future. All of downtown Spokane, including the park that I was sitting in, is a massive wi-fi hot spot, a whole neighborhood enveloped in an invisible field of high-volume Internet access that covers 100 city blocks. The same way some libraries and coffeehouses offer wireless Internet access, all of downtown Spokane is a wireless surfing zone. If I'd had a laptop with a wi-fi card, or even a Web-enabled PDA or cell phone, I could have surfed the Web right from that park bench for free.

Sadly, I didn't. That would have shown up those dirt-bike punks.

Spokane is by no means the only project of its kind. It's easy to imagine that by the end of the decade most U.S. cities will exist beneath an invisible dome of wi-fi--"city clouds," in the jargon of the industry. Rio Rancho, N.M., has one, though not on the scale of Spokane's; ditto for Grand Haven, Mich. (see sidebar), as well as Lafayette, Louis and Cerritos in California. And bigger players are moving in all the time. Cook County, Ill., is planning a massive 940-sq.-mi. cloud that would light up all of Chicago. Philadelphia announced a humongous hot zone of its own in September. Los Angeles and New York City are soliciting bids from wireless contractors. This stuff is just too cheap and too useful not to have. It doesn't even stop at the city limits. Out in the sticks, where there are no skyscrapers to get in the way of a wi-fi signal, wireless is even bigger. There's a hot spot in rural Walla Walla County, Wash., that runs 3,700 sq. mi.

I was in Spokane to meet the people behind its audacious experiment, principally a guy named Don Stalter, CEO of Vivato, the high-tech start-up that supplies the technology to make it possible. Stalter didn't found the company; it began with a Hewlett-Packard engineer named Skip Crilly, who lived in the hills outside Spokane and couldn't get anybody to run a high-speed line to his house. Like any good engineer, he thought outside the box: maybe he could get the speed without the wiring. The standard wireless Internet technology, wi-fi, was cheap and fast, but it worked only at a range of about 300 ft. What if there was a way to boost that range?

In 1999, Crilly, working with another HP engineer named Bob Conley, figured out a way to run a regular wi-fi signal through a phased-array antenna, a powerful piece of hardware that's used mostly by the military. Suddenly, they had a wi-fi hot spot a couple of miles wide. The world had never seen that before. If a regular wi-fi transmitter was a candle, this thing was a baseball-stadium spotlight. They called it, for reasons best known to themselves, Little Joe.

All they had to do was figure out what to do with it. Hewlett-Packard wasn't interested in the project, so Crilly and Conley went out and started their own company. They raised around $65 million in venture capital, most of which they burned through pretty quickly. They sold a few hundred Little Joes, but not nearly as many as they needed to sell. Stalter came on board in October of last year. A fast-talking veteran of the high-tech scene, he specializes in taking over companies that have lost their way. Stalter's job: to figure out what Crilly and Conley's wi-fi spotlight was good for and who would pay good money for it.

The answer came from an unexpected direction. Every year Spokane plays host to Hoopfest, the world's largest three-on-three basketball tournament--another source of local pride. Hoopfest involves some 6,000 three-person teams from all over the world playing 25,000 games around the city. Scoring and scheduling are a nightmare of confused people scurrying about, carrying little slips of paper with numbers on them--exactly the kind of problem technology is supposed to eliminate. So somebody had the bright idea of sticking one of Vivato's prototype wi-fi transmitters on top of Spokane city hall and flooding a few blocks of downtown with wi-fi, thus allowing all the scoring to be done online. The setup was about as ugly a piece of jerry-built hackery as you're ever likely to see--the workers ended up bolting one of Vivato's phased-array antennas onto an extra Hoopfest backboard--but it worked perfectly. Downtown Spokane was suddenly blessed with wireless goodness, and the tournament went off without a hitch, all those pesky little slips of paper having been replaced by sleek wireless PDAs.

And then everyone promptly forgot about the whole thing.

Well, almost everyone. It was the city's computer gnomes who first noticed that people were still using that Vivato antenna. Because the city never turned it off, it was still up there, pumping out free wireless Internet, and people were logging on. "All the time we're watching, there were always 10 to 15 people on the network," says Garvin Brakel, director of management information services for the city of Spokane. "It was unadvertised, unknown, but people were finding it regardless."

That started those computer gnomes thinking. City employees--police, fire fighters, meter cops and others--tend to roam around a lot. They need information, but they can't be bogged down with wires and cables. Maybe a huge zone of wireless Internet access could be part of the city's infrastructure ...

Meanwhile, a local commercial ISP called 180 Networks had been studying ways that urban wi-fi could attract more people to Spokane's downtown area, which was in need of a little revitalizing. As Starbucks has learned, people tend to hang out more if there's free Internet access to be had. They check their e-mail. They linger. And while they're lingering, they spend money. Light bulbs started appearing over people's heads all over town. Why not make downtown one big wireless zone? The city geeks, the Vivato geeks, the 180 Networks geeks and a local business group called the Downtown Spokane Partnership got together and created the Spokane HotZone.

In telling this story, Stalter likes to punch up his patter with wireless-industry slang. When he talks about bringing wi-fi to an area, he says he's going to "paint it!" or "light it up!" But the reality isn't that dramatic. Though they sound like a secondary weapons system from the starship Enterprise, the phased-array antennas are actually large, featureless beige-and-gray nubbins that sit unassumingly next to AC units on rooftops. It's almost impossible to pick them out of the skyline, though there are six of them in downtown Spokane, along with 12 smaller "bridge routers" that help fill in shadows cast by buildings. Jim West, Spokane's mayor, likes to point out that a few years ago, perennial rival Tacoma dubbed itself America's No. 1 Wired City. What do you think of your fancy wires now, Tacoma?

We tend to think of information as a liquid; we talk about how it flows through conduits--wires and cables--or gathers in pools in hard drives. But wi-fi turns information into an all-encompassing vapor that seeps into places it has never been before, and it has added an extra dimension to sleepy old Spokane. Elise Robertson is a 10-year veteran of the city's police force. Her squad car has a full-fledged wireless PC in it--the guts of it are in her glove compartment--with a touch-screen monitor stuck on her dashboard. If she sees a suspicious car at a stoplight, she can use the HotZone to run the suspect's plates and download arrest warrants, criminal records and affidavits to her squad car. That isn't unique. A lot of police departments have wireless networks, but they tend to be slow and poky. Slow and poky doesn't cut it in the field. "Before the light changes, I can come up with his driving record," Robertson says. "I do that all the time." The HotZone gives Robertson so much bandwidth, she can even download full-color mug shots in seconds.

Half the suggestions the city people came up with were news to Vivato. "They sat down and said, 'You know what we're using this for?'" Stalter said. "They're listing the applications. We had no idea. We don't know what the meter maid does all day." Now fire fighters can download the floor plans of burning buildings while they're on the way to the scene, right down to the room where the oily rags are stored. In the next few months the city is planning to give fire fighters clip-on webcams that can stream video back to the fire truck from inside a towering inferno. ("Instead of the fire hose dousing the building with water, you're dousing it with 10 megabit!" exults Stalter, sounding like he's running for office.)

Next come the parking meters. Soon, a parking attendant who writes you a ticket in Spokane will also be able to run your plates to see whether your car is hot. And when your time runs out, the fancy wi-fi-enabled parking meters will be smart enough to page a meter cop, so you will get all the parking tickets you deserve. Who knows, one day the meter could also be programmed to page your house to warn you that you're about to get a ticket--or to let your spouse know that you're parked in front of the movie theater on Thursday afternoon when you're supposed to be at work.

That kind of stuff makes you realize that life in the wireless city of the future isn't necessarily unmitigated bliss. Information is a two-edged sword: it can empower you, but it can also mess with your privacy. And there's such a thing as too much info. Stick a wi-fi-enabled camera on a streetlamp, stick a solar panel on the camera for power, and suddenly you have got cheap, instant 24-hr. streaming-video surveillance. "How many cities wouldn't want that?" Stalter asks rhetorically. "So Blade Runner is happening." (I think he means 1984, but same difference.)

But hang on a minute. How are companies like Vivato going to make money by giving away all this access for free? Vivato's technology appealed to Spokane not only because it's hugely powerful but also because it's absurdly inexpensive. You can get a Vivato transmitter for under $10,000, plus maintenance and bandwidth costs. "It's something like the Internet in the mid-'90s," Stalter says. "Remember when everything was free? You put it in, then you ask yourself how you're going to make money." His idea is eventually to flip Spokane's HotZone to a pay service. He will enlist local businesses to sell prepaid Internet-access cards to people wandering through the HotZone. But Stalter might also recall how scores of well-intentioned dotcoms went bust in the late 1990s when they tried to get consumers to pay for what they were used to getting for free.

Not every city cloud passes the cost along to the consumer. In Austin, Texas, local businesses maintain 84 free wi-fi hot spots networked together, and the companies split the cost between them; in theory, they make the money back by attracting bandwidth-hungry customers. "I like the idea of the technology," Richard Mackinnon, president of the Austin Wireless City Project, says of Spokane's HotZone. "The problem is more with the finances behind it. When you have the Zone, you're reduced to a single player: one big person has to pay for everything. That person is going to be tempted to recoup the costs." Free wi-fi enthusiasts have a certain zealotry about them, not unlike vegans and Naderites, but in this case you can kind of see their point. "There will always be free wi-fi, and there will always be paid wi-fi," Mackinnon says. "Pay is going to put it out there that free is less secure or less bandwidth, but hopefully there are always going to be people who realize that's b.s." If free and pay wi-fi go head to head in Spokane, it's easy to imagine people voting with their pocketbooks.

Will people actually pay for wi-fi? Can Vivato pull money out of thin air? Maybe not with prepaid cards, but, as Stalter says, the technology is way ahead of the applications, and over time alternative revenue sources are going to come crawling out of the woodwork. I thought of one myself, when I got back from Spokane. Parking in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., is so tight, it took 45 minutes of circling the block before I found a space. I spent that time doing a thought experiment: What if Vivato lit up my neighborhood with wi-fi? Then you could have curbside sensors that page your car the instant a spot opens up ... maybe a heads-up display on the windshield, showing a map of where the perfect spot is.

I ran this idea past the folks at Vivato. They love it. But won't everybody converge on the same prime spot as soon as it frees up? Not if you fork over extra to get notified, say, 30 seconds earlier. "You pay a premium for that!" says Kevin Ryan, Vivato's V.P. of marketing and business development, his eyes gleaming with invisible wi-fi light. "You're the platinum customer!"

There you have it. The future of free urban wi-fi looks bright. It just might cost a little more than we thought.