The case for municipal public Wi-Fi

Public Wi-Fi networks promise to give municipalities more than just free communications for their constituents.

Municipalities across Australia are rushing to build wireless networks for their cities. Perth, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Adelaide and Canberra have all made investments recently to provide free Wi-Fi in CBD areas.

Each city moved quickly and each investigated different models to fund and operate the network.

So what’s the hype all about, what are the different models and what is the business case for public Wi-Fi?

How public networks get built

Large outdoor networks require significant investment to build, and there are three ways this can happen: the municipality itself invests in the network, a carrier builds the network, or the two combine.

In Australia, we have several examples of both models. In Adelaide and Canberra there is a carrier partnership in place. What’s in it for the carrier? There’s the opportunity to connect their customers to the Wi-Fi network and off-load traffic from increasingly congested carrier networks. And there’s a branding opportunity, a means to reach out to new customers and bring them across.

What’s in it for the municipality? A partnership can be a means to build service without bearing the full brunt of infrastructure or network costs.

Local service provider Infrastructure Logic believes it’s important to keep public Wi-Fi networks carrier neutral. They see many parties, including carriers and application providers, buying services on these networks further down the track.

“Our business model appeals to municipalities, as our open-access wholesale Wi-Fi model enables multiple parties to share the same infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of traditional network models,” said Infrastructure Logic’s managing director, Mevan Jayatilleke.

“The open-access model allows for small and medium businesses, as well as municipalities, to develop innovative applications for people as well as for connected things.”

Public Wi-Fi: paid service or public utility?

Some cities see Wi-Fi as a utility and say ownership of the user’s experience should be firmly in the hands of the city.

“It was important to us that the City of Perth was the ultimate owner of our network. We own the user experience and it’s our own platform for innovation," said Jonathan Stoate, CIO at City of Perth.

“We have already leveraged our Wi-Fi infrastructure to enable the WA Symphony Orchestra to stream the ‘Symphony in the City’ and we will also be streaming the upcoming TEDx Perth event.”

“In addition, it enables us to choose any ISP to work with in the market and that gives us amazing flexibility for the future.”

This theme of control is common among several recent deployments. It provides municipalities with a platform to directly reach the people that matter to them and allow them to access online information guides and location maps on the fly.

In addition, in the case of an emergency, public safety announcements could be broadcast to all connected devices.

Perth’s public Wi-Fi coverage.

Big issues for public networks

There are some tough issues to be tackled for public network operators. Security, bandwidth and scalability are amongst the top concerns to be dealt with. While there are plenty of mature options in the market to filter and secure large-scale networks, the problem of scalability is not so easily handled.

This is a huge challenge for CBD Wi-Fi operators. What happens when there are 5000 people connecting to a network that usually services 50? Big crowds present during major public events or festivals pose a few different problems. One is bandwidth demand. The increasing number of concurrent connections may strain individual Wi-Fi access points (APs).

Many public Wi-Fi operators are considering the use of temporary Wi-Fi APs powered by solar panels or batteries. Wireless APs can create a mesh to enable additional APs to be deployed without further cabling.

Another big issue is radio interference. The human body is a great absorber of RF signals. Lots of bodies can mean lots of additional radio interference. Moving bodies make the problem a difficult one to plan for.

“We chose wireless technology that could cope with lots of interference in a challenging and changeable outdoor environment," explained Stoate.

Then there is the question of coverage. Should we build a CBD-only network? How far out should coverage extend? Location-based services and Wi-Fi analytics will come to the rescue on this front.

We can now capture and analyse traffic patterns from Wi-Fi-enabled mobile devices, even if they don’t actively connect to the network. We can use anonymous data to see where traffic is concentrated then create a real-time heat map, which allows network operators to analyse where their users are aggregating within a space. They can define zones and compare traffic data between different zones.

All this data is customisable for time intervals, allowing historical analysis and tracking of trends.

Hot Spot 2.0 and carrier offload

A recent change to public Wi-Fi authentication is Hotspot 2.0. It offers a simpler authentication process and can also allow a public network owner to work with a mobile operator for data offload by using a phone’s SIM card to authenticate. This is a means for the network owner to monetise public Wi-Fi, without handing over ownership rights.

Hotspot 2.0 also offers increased security and makes roaming between hotspots a seamless experience. This concept was particularly appealing for cities like San Francisco and San Jose that recently implemented Hotspot 2.0 networks.

“Hotspot 2.0 enables open Wi-Fi to become secure Wi-Fi in a very transparent way. The number 2 reason we chose it was roaming,” said Flavio Aggio, CTO, San Francisco Department of Technology.

Wi-Fi analytics for planning

Today, city planners work hard to gather data on human traffic movement. Location-based services on a Wi-Fi network make this process a whole lot simpler. During this year’s Vivid festival in Sydney, IBM and Ruckus Wireless used location data analytics to map and visualise the real-time movement of festival attendees with Wi-Fi devices walking around the 40-plus installations along the Vivid Light Walk precinct.

"Today’s cities are bustling, exciting and packed full of a diverse range of people. But underneath is a complex system of infrastructure and operations," said Glen Thomas, Vice President of Marketing and Communications, IBM Australia and New Zealand.

“The opportunity now exists for organisations to connect and better understand the relationships between these systems using advanced technologies, like analytics,” added Thomas. “For example, understanding how visitors move around large-scale public events can help organisers better plan to enhance visitor experiences.”

Location-based services on a Wi-Fi network provide cities with unique insights into their residents and tourists. This has the potential to change the way city planning data is collected. Planning data today captures simple metrics - location-based services offer city councils a big data approach.

Time-based information on traffic flow, dwell times at locations, and numbers of new versus returning visitors enables city councils to plan development, change zoning, develop tourism strategies and, even better, plan for an emergency - by identifying potential bottlenecks, for example.

The business case for public Wi-Fi

The business case for public Wi-Fi varies from place to place. While it can be all about traditional mobile data and built by network carriers, more and more cities are looking at public Wi-Fi as a utility.

This doesn’t mean carriers won’t be able to connect their customers to these networks, but it’s likely the city itself will want to be the broker of any connection between their users and the service provider or carrier.

No matter what the business case, there is a rush to deploy services to begin a ‘smart city’ journey. It certainly seems the technology is mature enough to make it happen