WIRELESS IN PHILADELPHIA, PART 1

So I finally got the hotel wifi working with my Belkin card, checked four days of email , PD and blogs (great job on the Strickland/Flannery debate, everyone!), and got a chance to post something.

Bonnie and I are holed up with the dog at an Extended Stay America in Malvern... well, not actually in Malvern, but in an exurban office park moonscape nearby. I'm proud to relate that Bonnie gave her sister a kidney on Friday, so we're here while she heals enough to travel. Malvern is half an hour from downtown Philadelphia by car and an hour by train, so I haven't spent a lot of time in the city but I did manage to spend some time Monday with Derek Pew, the interim CEO of Wireless Philadelphia, and then got a tour Tuesday of the neighborhood wireless network run by the People's Emergency Center in West Philly.

I'll get to Philly Wireless when I have more time. For now I want to thank Derek and Corey Robinson of PEC for their time (Corey might actually read this, he seems to have been here before) and say a few words about the PEC system. It was described at length in this Civitium article in MuniWireless a few months ago. Here's a short version:

PEC started in the '70s as a shelter for abused and homeless women and has since expanded to provide all kinds of social and development services for a small, mostly Black low-income neighborhood around it. The neighborhood is a triangle between two main streets (Lancaster and Powelton Avenues) full of two-story rowhouses and a scattering of old commercial buildings -- one of which, a former abandoned warehouse, is PEC's beautifully renovated headquarters.

Several years ago, as part of its computer training and ownership program, PEC built a neighborhood wifi network. It's technically pretty simple. They have two Cisco access point antennas on the roof of their own center -- which is one of the neighborhood's highest points -- and antenna-and-bridge setups on other roofs around the neighborhood which have unobstructed lines of sight to one of the access points. The bridges receive the wifi signal from the center and rebroadcast it to nearby areas. Since most of PEC's target area is within a few hundred feet of an access point or bridge, the resulting wifi "cloud" covers pretty much the whole PEC neighborhood. The only router is back at the center, hooked up to a single Verizon DSL line.

Access to the PEC wifi isn't open to the general public -- it's password-protected and limited to neighbors who complete the Digital Inclusion training. They get a year of wifi Internet access for $5 a month, using USB clients that PEC provides with their recycled PCs. After a year, neighbors have to move on to a commercial service (Corey says PEC doesn't intend to get into the ISP business). That transition will become cheaper and easier when the city's EarthLink wireless is operational in the neighborhood, since most of PEC's trainees will probably qualify for one of the 25,000 low-income discounts EarthLink has agreed to provide -- enabling them to get continuing wifi service for $9.95 a month.

PEC's system isn't cheap -- Corey estimates the parts-and-labor cost of each new rooftop installation at around $3,000, including nearly $2,000 for the Cisco equipment. Remember, this is a neighborhood of maybe ten blocks with equipment on eight or nine rooftops, so it adds up to a very substantial investment to serve a couple of hundred households in a small turf. (Much of PEC's original hardware was donated by Cisco, a partner during the program's first couple of years, though not so much now).Cisco wifi hardware is considered very expensive but also very good... which may help explain PEC's success in getting a good network signal to PCs located deep inside brick rowhouses, using just ordinary little desktop client antennas.

Would this approach work in with less expensive hardware from other vendors, in a more spread-out neighborhood with bigger houses?

I don't know. But it seems to be working fine for PEC's neighborhood, right now.

More tomorrow.