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Overseas Wireless Deployments Offer Lessons for U.S.

Community networks hold promise for replacing failed muni wireless projects.

How we measure success is as important as what we are measuring. On March 19, 2008, the FCC dramatically revised its broadband data collection, in essence, finally giving in to mounting evidence that current assessments have been woefully inadequate. Previous data collection may have allowed politicians to declare "mission accomplished" - that universal affordable broadband is available throughout the United States - yet the fact remains that large swaths of the United States have fallen behind a growing list of other countries in broadband provision.

Within the U.S. context, wireless networks have often followed a familiar trajectory: utilizing hyperbolic and misleading rhetoric in making promises to local communities; obfuscating the state of actual deployment and the real-world service levels provided; and ignoring success stories that point to innovative business models overseas that are unheard-of in the United States. Sylvia Cadena, coordinator of WiLAC in Ecuador, points out one of the most overlooked areas of innovation in this realm, "[Rather] than municipal networks, we look more for community networks, which although [they] are affected by the same context, do not depend on the political will, but the organization and hard work of its members."

In fact, these community networking organizations have been the groups that pioneered large-scale wireless networking technologies - eight years ago, when there were few companies deploying wireless networks, dedicated groups of technology experts, programmers and community organizers were developing and deploying wireless technologies in London, San Francisco and Urbana, Ill. Today, the networking technologies of these groups have matured to the point where relatively astounding community networks have been deployed using the wireless systems developed by this global network of open source programmers.


Growing Up
Dana Spiegel, president and executive director of NYCwireless, has followed the maturation of these technologies and their real-world deployments throughout North America. "The interesting and inspirational networks are the ones that grew out of community wireless initiative," she said. "In particular, Austin, Texas, and Montreal are great examples." Both cities formed public-private partnerships, but the foundation has been locally based nongovernmental organizations, not private, for-profit companies, Spiegel said, "These cities were smart enough to recognize that their best chance of success was not only to build upon the work of local volunteers, but to involve them intimately in the creation of the local nets. This creates an incentive for other local activists and volunteers, and ensures there's a direct connection to the people who are going to be the early adopters of these nets."

Anthony Townsend, a community wireless movement veteran and research director at the Institute for the Future, also looks "mostly outside the U.S." for innovative projects. "The work of Ile Sans Fil in Montreal is probably the most interesting because it's a great example of a community network that has effectively graduated to become the municipal network. Something similar is going on in Austin, Texas, as well," said Townsend. In both cases, innovative business models have been developed to use local expertise and empower community organizations to deploy and manage the networks.

Richard MacKinnon, president of Austin Wireless, also investigates overseas community wireless deployments and said he's "inspired by the work of Ramon Roca and Guifi.net in Catalan." Guifi.net is a grass-roots initiative formed to overcome the shortcomings of telecom incumbents who failed to adequately serve local communities. "This community wireless network was created to provide connectivity for scores of rural villages that were underserved by Telefonica," he said. "'Underserved' is code for when an incumbent service provider declines to provide service or provides it at monopoly prices," MacKinnon continued. "Guifi.net developed a business and technological model and taught people how to take control of their economic destiny away from Telefonica." Often,

community wireless networks and the technologies and business models they utilize are ignored by decision-makers because of the false sense that these are small-scale endeavors. But the reality, as MacKinnon explained, is quite different, "Much like a gigantic [local area network] that spans [throughout Catalonia] incorporating hundreds of independently financed and deployed nodes, Guifi.net provides the critical infrastructure necessary for businesses and individuals."

Guifi.net, which recently won Spain's National Telecommunications Award, has focused on creating an extendable, "organic" network rather than one that provides ubiquitous connectivity; yet its service area is far larger than Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York City combined. Currently Guifi.net is composed of more than 4,000 wireless nodes spanning scores of different towns and villages throughout northeastern Spain.

Ramon Roca, coordinator of the Guifi.net project, is the first to point to both the personal impetus and the grass-roots support this network has. He explained, "My interest [was] primarily because of the need of broadband access for my professional activities, without having to move to a city," Roca said. "When my brother became the mayor of our small rural and dispersed village [2,000 inhabitants, 54 square kilometers], we decided to go ahead and give a chance to our neighborhood - despite [what we were] observing around us, and because we had no funds, and we decided to look for allies in other municipalities and communities." Guifi.net may not be the largest community wireless network around. In the Djursland area of Denmark, community groups have been building a regional wireless network for more than half a decade - today, this network spans roughly 1,000 square miles - utterly dwarfing the major municipal wireless networks deployed in the United States.


Taking the Leap
For large-scale metro and regional-scale networks, Townsend indicated the remarkable successes being realized overseas, "Parts of Western Europe, like Spain and Germany, have vigorous grass-roots groups building large-scale public infrastructure with very little money, and in Central and Eastern Europe you see all kinds of places where community networks are emerging as the dominant Internet service providers in places where there was no broadband before. There are great stories from places like Belgrade where wireless activists are rappelling down the side of apartment buildings installing community Nets and doing hilltop shots across the border to Croatia and Bosnia," said Townsend.

Glenn Strachan has extensive experience creating large-scale wireless networks. As project director for Macedonia Connects, Strachan coordinated a project to wirelessly connect the entire country. While we may not think of this area as leading technological innovation, countries like Macedonia and Estonia are leaving the United States in their broadband deployment wake. Strachan said, "I look internationally for exciting projects, and I also look for rural municipal wireless projects in the United States. Anyone can build an urban network using wireless devices, but it is a wholly different activity to connect people in a rural environment or in a country which has a 'difficult' telecom reality - often led by a monopolistic provider unwilling to open the marketplace to competition and supported by the government." Further south, in Athens, Greece, the community wireless network spans most of the metropolitan area and consists of more than 2,000 wireless nodes.

So what's gone wrong in the United States?

Perhaps the worst part of the U.S. broadband problem is how little information we actually collect and the grossly inaccurate manner in which we collect it. In a remarkable example of political double-speak, the very same March 19, 2008, press release, the FCC declares: "An order adopted by the Federal Communications Commission today will increase the precision and quality of broadband subscribership data collected every six months from broadband services providers ... improvements include collecting detailed subscribership information on a local level and more detailed information about the speed of broadband service [and to] capture more

precise information about upload and download broadband speeds in the marketplace." But the release also states several sentences later, "the FCC today adopted a report showing that broadband services are currently being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion."

The notion that all Americans are having broadband services deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion doesn't even stand up to a cursory examination of the facts. While the most important telecommunications decision-makers in the country may have finally concluded that their data collection has been woefully inadequate to date (and this only after a massive multiyear campaign by public interest organizations representing underserved communities), the FCC still declares that "everything is fine according to our data."

"To our detriment, the current mix of providers and regulatory policies has squashed innovation in the United States," MacKinnon said. "We have a culture that protects the investments of incumbent telecoms to the point of obviating innovation - they're incented to devote more of their budgets to litigation and lobbying than to R&D [research and development]. As a result, we've developed a culture of defending proprietary technology - no matter how outdated - and collecting rents, not matter how exorbitant." Meanwhile, outside this distinctly U.S. context, MacKinnon sees that "the most interesting wireless projects are found in places such as Catalan, Bosnia, Africa and rural Texas. They all have in common a renegade subculture leveraging open source software, open hardware and open network philosophy. They've developed a culture of building, creating and connecting - no matter how far-fetched - on a shoestring budget."

"I don't think that there's that much in terms of muni-nets worldwide, but an interesting standout is Estonia," said Spiegel. "This country has almost complete availability of Wi-Fi for its citizens, and the network has become a critical part of the nation's infrastructure." The problem then, has to do with the lack of telecommunications political leadership here Stateside. "In the U.S. I think the biggest problem is that local governments are too afraid of spending money, and are too afraid of standing up to telco incumbents," Spiegel said. "Local governments should stand up for their citizens, and spend money when appropriate, and otherwise hold telcos and cablecos to their end of any contracts. Only with forceful and decisive action and dedication will any muni-net have the possibility of success."


Community Service
Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.com, said the "U.S. is ahead in terms of number of deployments of large-scale Wi-Fi networks. The U.S. is also home to a number of hardware companies like Tropos and Meraki; in terms of services, the U.S. is ahead (e.g., Skyhook Wireless, which provides location-based service)." Craig Settles, president of Successful.com and a longtime municipal wireless consultant wrote, "From the cities I've talked to in Europe, it seems that cities such as Paris that have deployed fiber networks are providing services heads and shoulders above the U.S. in terms of high speed, low price and diversity of offerings."

Settles sees municipal wireless endeavors as less ahead of the curve. "The wireless side of things appear to be less advanced, depending on the country. Besides roadblocks from incumbents, you have European Union rulings that can trump initiatives within individual countries (such as with Dublin, Ireland, recently), government limits on the power wireless transmitters can use," he said. "You also have lots of small towns and much older cities, so the access to suitable vertical assets for building infrastructure hinders getting coverage in as many places as people would like."

While municipal endeavors may be floundering on both sides of the Pond, the EU has a more vibrant community wireless scene than

the United States - the question this begs is why?

One possibility may be that more resources for creating the building blocks for community wireless networks are available in the EU. As Michael Maranda, president of the Association for Community Networking, pointed out, compared to a host of other countries, "We're lagging in all respects: cost/speed, cost/bit and speeds available, choice in technology, freedom to switch platforms, freedom to utilize network services of our choice [and] interoperability."

"Europe is home to several metro-scale grass-roots wireless networks based on open source technology. These include city-spanning networks of thousands of nodes in Berlin, Vienna [Austria], Graz [Austria] and many other cities, and throughout the Czech Republic," wrote Joshua King, senior system administrator for the chambana.net community Web hosting project. The result of these activities is, as King said, "Those networks enjoy widely varying levels of official support from their respective municipalities, but nevertheless provide peerless service on commodity hardware platforms costing less than $50. There is no community effort in the U.S. on a comparable scale, and as far as I am aware no commercial one either."

Wolfgang Nagele, network engineer at RIPE and longtime community wireless developer, summed up the issue, "In Europe the whole municipal networking movement never ended up a big political movement - yet. Most initiatives I know of are working without political backgrounds. In Vienna, for example, it's part of our belief to keep out of political daily business to avoid interest conflicts." The Viennese community network is both a cutting-edge test bed for new technologies and provides access to most of the metropolitan area.


Get the Message
According to Strachan, "The main difference beyond all others is that people overseas get it. They understand that connectivity is an integral element associated with their own development. In the USA, this concept appears to be absent." Strachan's assessment is based on first-hand experiences.

"In every country I have worked in that there is a monopolistic provider who has no desire for competition within the marketplace, there is always a struggle," he said. "As for innovation, the people within each country have already determined the best and most innovative ways to provide connectivity, but they lack the capital resources and some of the ultimate expertise required to complete the picture."

Within this context, a vibrant cornucopia of different technologies and business models are being implemented. As Roca summarizes, there are "particular cases with very good coverage, good infrastructures, etc., and others without. This contrast becomes much more evident at the developing countries." In turn, this diversity of needs and resources drives an array of large-scale implementations.

Townsend contrasted this with the current U.S. situation. "Our culture, geography and markets have come together to stifle innovation," he said. "First, we already have a lot of broadband choices - not real competition, and not the fastest broadband, but for a lot of people 'good enough'. So the wireless underground is not attracting as many talented people as it did in 2000-2003 (especially when a lot of them were dot-com-ers out of work). Also, Americans just aren't as interested in 'local' as [much as] other cultures. So we don't see the intense focus on using hotspots as local content portals, or creating private non-Internet networks for file sharing, video chat, etc."  

Dharma Dailey, principal at the Ethos Group, a wireless consultancy, summed it up, "Addressing network innovation, I see more and more people who I consider to be the brightest innovators in networking get increasingly more excited about their projects overseas than those they work on in the U.S. I wonder if we are going to see a brain drain of network innovators from the U.S. When they

can leapfrog far beyond the legacy networks we're shackled to here in the States, who can blame them?"

At issue is the migration of technologies to locales where they are being actively implemented. While the United States may have led the charge a half-decade ago, much like our lagging broadband penetration ranking, we're losing our competitive edge when it comes to wireless R&D, "Many key innovations in networking not only started here, but were incubated at U.S. taxpayers' expense - computers, the Internet, satellite, cellular telephony," wrote Dailey. "Now we're being punished for being first because we're stuck with incumbents who benefited from those early innovations but are firmly committed to stifling game-changing innovation now."

The real challenge for the United States may be whether we can switch tactics quickly enough to regain our technological lead in an increasingly sophisticated global economy, adapt our business models to take advantage of disruptive technologies, and expand our decision-making to include options that have been systematically ignored regardless of their continuing successes. In the end, even a top-down bureaucracy like the FCC is realizing that fundamental changes to how we've handled broadband implementation are vitally important in the immediate future.