Silicon Valley-the country’s hub of innovation and technology-is home to more than 2.4 million people and a group of businesses that read like a who’s who of the dotcom darlings. Yet, for all the money and societal changes that were born from the area, there’s still no region-wide high-speed wireless Internet coverage using Wi-Fi technology to be found.
Sure, there are plenty of small-scale networks that serve the populations living within range-Google Inc. has a municipal Wi-Fi network that covers 12 square miles in its home base of Mountain View, Calif.-but nothing covers the entire landscape with ubiquitous coverage of this type.
Despite the relatively quick freefall the municipal Wi-Fi movement has experienced the past couple months; plenty of cities and other agencies in Silicon Valley are still pushing ahead. All is not lost, they say.
Wireless quest
Wireless Silicon Valley represents the goal of at least 28 cities spread across four counties to build a broadband wireless Internet network spanning more than 1,500 square miles.
“Silicon Valley needs to be at the forefront of deploying and using the latest wireless technologies. Many of the companies that invent and manufacture wireless networking chips, equipment and appliances are located here. Silicon Valley should be a destination for people from around the world to learn about how wireless technologies can be deployed and put to productive use,” reads the group’s mission statement on its Web site.
Ideas are free, but this project will carry one serious price tag.
“The valley’s known for its technology,” John Lang, economic development officer with the City of San Jose, said in an interview with RCR Wireless News. “The big issue is funding, particularly on the pilot areas.”
San Carlos and Palo Alto, which both agreed to be test sites that would cover one-square mile apiece, are still waiting for things to get off the ground and unwired. Waiting for $500,000 to be precise.
“Half a million dollars is peanuts around here-Intel takes in that much cash every eight minutes,” Vindu Goel wrote in a column in the San Jose Mercury News earlier this month.
The entire project is expected to cost as much as $200 million at last count, which breaks down to about $133,000 per square mile.
“The stage of the game that we’re at right now-I hate to say it-is wait and see,” Lang said. “When it came time to implement, that’s where it got stuck.”
And without those test sites in place, few cities, if any, will be ready to plunk down taxpayer dollars on a project that only exists in theory.
Choppy waters
There’s plenty of unease around the future of Wi-Fi these days. This past summer EarthLink Inc. rescinded its proposal to cover the estimated $14 million to $17 million cost of building a citywide Wi-Fi network in San Francisco. The company had Wi-Fi operations in about a half-dozen cities at the time and contracts for another half-dozen, yet those unraveled soon after. The company later cut a $5 million check to Houston for missing a contract deadline on plans for building a Wi-Fi network there. And AT&T Inc. also pulled out of its plans to build the company’s first municipal Wi-Fi network in Springfield, Ill. Chicago also scrapped plans for citywide coverage, citing costs and the rapidly changing pace of new technologies coming to the marketplace.
Most analysts saw little benefit for companies like EarthLink to shoulder all the upfront costs of building networks of this scale. When EarthLink asked San Francisco and others to meet the company halfway, the answer was a definitive no.
The waiting game
With all that hanging overhead, and geographically less than an hour’s drive north, the Wireless Silicon Valley project has slowed considerably.
“No city agency, to my knowledge, has said ‘we’re investing X amount of dollars,’ it’s seeing what opportunities there are,” Lang said. “From our perspective it’s really kind of a wait-and-see on these demonstration sites before making a financial commitment.”
San Jose, the nation’s 10th most populated city, will play a key role in whatever comes of the project. And while the city is not lacking broadband coverage, it sees the immense benefits public and private sectors would gain as a result of a mobile network.
“It’s not so much providing a resource for residents to get and use the Internet through Wi-Fi. This valley is pretty well wired. San Jose in particular has 100% broadband coverage,” Lang said. “The real need is in service delivery and providing more of a business coverage, which would extend not only to the public-safety realm, but public works.
“It was really geared toward providing a service more from a public perspective,” he added.
Yet the cities and agencies involved have quickly realized that they won’t be able to pin too much risk on the backs of service providers.
Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, which is organizing the project, is exploring new business models that might help technology vendors, led by Cisco Systems Inc., recoup their costs quicker. The foregone conclusion is that government leaders need to help alleviate vendor’s concerns by ensuring the profitability of the project.
Why-Fi?
Beyond that, there’s still a relative unease about the viability of Wi-Fi as a technology for the future. “I think that’s what you’re seeing right now. Is this the right tool?” Lang said.
The project is not committed to Wi-Fi, yet no alternative technology has been thrown into the mix at this point.
“Even now the issue of WiMAX is taking up a lot of discussion,” said Steven Turner, deputy director of information technology with San Jose. “Those are all issues still on the table and I think it really depends on what the business model looks like.”
San Jose already has its own downtown Wi-Fi coverage and could very well decide to go it alone if the region-wide approach fails, but everyone involved remains hopeful for the latter.
“I think there is a question mark right now about Wi-Fi and whether it’s going to meet its expectations,” Turner added. “Our city is very concerned about the price tag of things and so we’ve been trying to figure how much it will cost for the city and what are the benefits we’d realize from that.”
