Boston is a unique city, boasting some of the country’s oldest buildings and richest cultural institutions, while at the same time attracting some of the most cutting-edge research institutions. So, when Mayor Thomas Menino announced he was forming a Wireless Task Force to examine the practicability of making the city wireless, it was at once surprising and somewhat expected.
As a way of “bridging the digital divide,” The Boston Foundation, the city’s largest community organization, cited WiFi — or wireless fidelity — technology as a way to both bring access to communities where it was lacking and to keep the city on the cutting edge.
The Wireless Task Force, which counts 22 members from the fields of business, academia and city management, was hand-picked by Menino to examine both the problem of Internet access in Boston and to see what other communities have done to alleviate their own problems.
In July 2006, the task force submitted its 54-page final report to the Mayor, suggesting, “the city facilitate the introduction of a revolutionary carrier-neutral, open access and wholesale-only business model to the wireless broadband value chain.”
“We believe the non-profit route may be the best way to bring low-cost service to every neighborhood while providing a platform for innovation unlike any in the nation,” Menino said in an accompanying press release. “By keeping the network open, we believe we can create a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity, which will spur economic growth and job creation.”
Task force co-chair Rick Burnes, co-founder of Charles River Ventures, said the idea originally came from the Boston Foundation report.
“It is important for a bunch of reasons,” Burnes told The Daily Free Press. “First and most importantly, a lot of people can’t afford broadband Internet.”
“It is also important because broadband Internet is an elastic market,” he continued. “The more people sign up, the lower the price will go.”
While Burnes said he could not put an exact dollar figure on the amount the non-profit would need to raise to fund the project, he said it might require $10 million or more.
Burnes said he thought there was a lot of interest in the project, from both corporations and communities, and that the task force was trying to raise the money to get the project going.
“We’ve really set up a two-tier structure,” Burnes said. “What normally happens is that people make proposals and one is accepted to build and sell the service. We’re going to build it and offer a lot of companies the chance to buy it.”
Burnes said the task force felt offering the opportunity to provide services for the network to multiple companies would increase competition and therefore drive down the price of the service offered.
Lucy Warsh, deputy press secretary for the City of Boston, said the task force examined about 40 other municipalities over the course of their five-month investigation.
“Ultimately, however, no other city has done what Boston is doing,” Warsh said in an email. “This approach is truly unique.”
Warsh said a timetable for a complete rollout of the project was too hard to predict, but the project has gained enough momentum to enter the pilot phase, which was announced Monday.
The Mayor unveiled two new WiFi HotZones, one in the North End’s Columbus Park and one in Quincy Market, and detailed the beginning of a community network project for the Grove Hall and Dudley Square areas of Roxbury.
“The Initiative is well underway,” Warsh said. “The Mayor’s internal team is working with Pam Reeve, the interim CEO, on all aspects of creating the non-profit, from developing partnerships, to raising funds, to studying city assets.”
“The city’s contribution is its assets,” Warsh said. “Light poles, fireboxes and buildings.”
This multi-tiered approach can be seen with collaboration between companies and government agencies.
The Columbus Park hot spot was also a collaboration between Cisco Inc., Verizon, the Boston Parks Department and the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
Tom Wetmore, founder of MetroNext Inc., one of four companies collaborating on the Grove Hall and Dudley Square network, said his company had neither been promised anything nor demanded anything to contribute to the project.
Wetmore said because of the structure of the technology there has been little competition in broadband Internet service to this point.
“The back-haul is low, the cost of service is low,” Wetmore said. “It’s just that last mile that is expensive. That is the part that most Internet service providers are making their money on.”
According to the task force’s final report, if a broadband user pays a $40 monthly rate, $37 of that payment go to the companies that built the network into each home, while only $3 goes to the company actually providing the internet backhaul, also known as bandwidth.
Under the wireless system, much of these costs could be avoided because the wireless signals would eliminate the need to run wiring into each new user’s home, allowing for the price to drop while more people gained access to the service.
The services offered in the pilot programs currently in place will be free, according to an Oct. 16 press release, but upon completion, the services will be offered from $10 to $15 a month.