Community Broadband As Generative Infrastructure

16 Apr 2016

Community Broadband As Generative Infrastructure

In an earlier post I discussed Marjorie Kelly’s framework for distinguishing “generative” vs. “extractive” ownership models. In this post, I’ll try to further clarify this distinction by considering some key characteristics of community-owned local access networks in relation to Kelly’s framework (in my next post I’ll shift my focus to middle mile and special access fiber). To get started, I’ll reiterate one of my key working premises, that when an extractive ownership model is combined with a lack of competitive pressure or corrective regulation (as is currently the situation in much of the nation’s local access and special access markets), service […]

29 Apr 2015

Detroit Digital Stewards: Unlicensed Open Source Neighborhood Networks

In a series of posts over the past two months, I’ve looked at efforts by private companies and city governments to use unlicensed spectrum to improve choice, affordability, innovation and service quality in the communications sector. In this post I’ll add another type of entity to the mix of unlicensed spectrum innovators: local neighborhoods, where issues, interactions and initiatives tend to be more personal and place-based. One focal point for this kind of neighborhood-driven network initiative is Detroit, a city facing severe financial constraints and one of the nation’s lowest levels of Internet penetration (see tables in this earlier post). […]

21 Apr 2015

LinkNYC: Free Muni Wi-Fi with Big Apple Style & Ambition

In my last post I described Boston’s recently-launched Wicked Free Wi-Fi as a new generation of municipal wireless networks likely to be more successful than the first generation of projects launched a decade earlier. Another member of this new generation is LinkNYC, a recently announced Wi-Fi network that will be deployed in New York City starting later this year. While they have some things in common (i.e., a focus on free outdoor nomadic service), the NYC project is, in key respects, different, more ambitious and perhaps more controversial than Boston’s Wicked Free. As Matthew Flamm put it in the lead […]

17 Apr 2015

Boston’s “Wicked Free Wi-Fi”: A New Model for Municipal Wi-Fi?

2015-04-17
Mitchell Shapiro
Blog

In my last post I briefly reviewed the less-than-stellar history of municipal Wi-Fi networks that were deployed roughly a decade ago. As I noted in that post, these projects employed earlier generations of technology and often-poorly-conceived “public-private partnerships.” And, importantly, they were launched well before the combination of smartphones/tablets and data-capped LTE/4G mobile services had turbocharged demand for nomadic Wi-Fi connectivity. In this post I’m going to focus on an example of what I consider a new generation of municipal Wi-Fi networks, Boston’s Wicked Free Wi-Fi service, which the city formally launched in April. As reported by Michael Farrell in […]

15 Apr 2015

Community WiFi in the Smartphone Era: lessons & differences from the past

So far, this series of blog posts has focused on what private companies are doing in the unlicensed spectrum space—including startups, cable operators, Google and mobile carriers. In the next few posts I’ll consider what cities and local neighborhoods have done, are doing, and are planning to do with unlicensed spectrum. As a first step in considering current and future “community WiFi” projects, it’s worth taking a look back at an earlier wave of municipal WiFi networks. These date back roughly a decade, with one of the most ambitious early projects, in Philadelphia, being announced in April 2005, just a […]

12 Feb 2015

Community Fiber Networks: Bringing Competition and World-Class Infrastructure to American Cities

In the following video, President Obama announced several steps his Administration is taking to encourage municipally-owned broadband networks, as well as the rationale for taking them. A few weeks after the president’s January 14 speech, the FCC announced it would be voting on a similar approach to municipal broadband at its February 26 meeting, where it will also vote on a proposal to classify broadband access as a Title II common carrier. Since community broadband is a topic I hope to write about here in the future, and the Commission’s meeting is only two weeks away, I thought I’d share some initial […]

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