Linux Makes Wi-Fi Happen in New York City

I met with Terry Schmidt at Emenity's offices near Wall Street, where he briefed me on the challenges of deploying public Wi-Fi in New York's peculiar urban settings. The first big project for both NYCwireless and Emenity was Bryant Park, which shares a midtown block with the New York's Public Library. Terry explains:

Terry sees Emenity as a midway organization between the purely voluntary and the purely self-reliant. Bryant Park, for example, originally was built by NYCwireless, then maintained by Emenity and now is run entirely in-house by the park itself.

Emenity's biggest customer is the Downtown Alliance, a business improvement district (BID) organized to “create and promote a safe, clean, live-work, totally wired community”. BIDs throughout the city are supported by a small additional local sales tax. Improvements to Bryant Park—which are nothing less than spectacular, considering the no-mans-land it used to be—are examples of a BID at work. Because the alliance serves landowners, it also can approach them with requests to use their roofs or windows for wireless antennas aimed down at public spaces.

A Rooftop Antenna Serves City Hall Park

At City Hall Park, the rooftop across the street at J&R Music and Computer World proved to be the ideal access point location. A square white sector antenna with a beam width of about 40°, angles down at the park and provides a signal footprint that serves the park itself and little else. At the far edge of the park by City Hall it fades away. A fairly precise footprint also graciously yields to other access points at the local Starbucks, City Hall, the Woolworth Building and elsewhere in the neighborhood.

Terry Schmidt says NYCwireless encourages local citizens operating free access points to label them “NYCwireless” and register with NYCwireless so they appear on the organization's node list. End user licensing runs the gamut from locked-down to free. Time-Warner, for example, aggressively denies users the right to share bandwidth. At the other extreme, Verizon sells Wi-Fi access points to its DSL customers.

The black bump on this pay phone is a Wi-Fi antenna.

Verizon, which has thousands of phone booths on the streets of New York, has seen the same writing on the own wall, and come up with a brilliant plan: turn phone booths into access points. The first 150 were fired up on May 13, and the company has plans to add the service to 500 or more throughout the city and beyond.

At the time of this writing, the service is available and free, to Verizon business and residential DSL customers only. But there's nothing in the deployment that prevents the company from opening up to other customers or from opening up completely—it was designed that way. In fact, it was designed to be as easily deployable and modifiable as possible, which is why the company made use of Linux and open-source tools. Sean Byrnes, an architect with Verizon, explained it this way:

When I said it sounded to me like Verizon was an example of a company that found it easier to roll their own solutions than depend on vendors for help, Sean Byrnes replied, “That would be an understatement, actually.” He explained:

With that many managed access points on the street, the Verizon people have been gaining some valuable experience with Wi-Fi in the real world. Terry Schmidt isn't optimistic about nonfree business models for Wi-Fi. He says, “We don't think that a lot of the for-pay wireless stuff has a sustainable business model. Companies like T-Mobile, with all those Starbucks locations, are hemorraging money, and almost nobody's using them.”

Meanwhile, plenty of people are taking advantage of free Wi-Fi in places like Bryant Park and Alt.Coffee. “Free wireless is good for business”, Terry says.

Does Verizon's service, free for existing customers, serve as a conditional flower box? I believe so. Verizon is the incumbent local phone company in New York. It has a lot of home and business DSL customers. Flower boxes that appear magically for those customers are a nice bonus to existing service. It's a way for Verizon to say “Take that laptop out of here. Go sit in a cafe somewhere”.

This kiosk at Bryant Park hosts an access point.

The Bryant Park Welcome Page