Smart meters aren't just for electricity anymore. In Santa Clara, the city is now using the technology to bring free citywide outdoor Wi-Fi to the entire community. The Washington Post recently covered the story

New smart meters, now being installed on homes, are primarily for electricity and water metering. The meters send usage reports via the city's wireless network, but they also have a separate channel that provides outdoor Internet access. The more houses outfitted with the new meters, the larger the network.

Santa Clara re-launched the free service in early 2012 after its first attempt resulted in a limited coverage area. In addition to using its fiber for wi-fi, the city also leases dark fiber over its 57-mile network.

While expanding the Wi-Fi network with this new technology won't bring high capacity connections to all households in Santa Clara, it is a step in the right direction.

“This is just one of the major benefits our community will enjoy as a result of our advanced metering technology,” said John Roukema, director of Silicon Valley Power, the community’s utility provider. “Now our residents, visitors and local workforce can get Internet access while waiting for a train, shopping downtown, getting their car washed or relaxing in their yard.”

Benton PUD, located in south central Washington, recently expanded its fiber foot print through Richland and Rattlesnake Mountain. The move involved a collaborative effort between the City of Richland, the Benton PUD, and the Department of Energy.

According to Annette Cary of the Tri-City Herald, the expansion will bring better communications to the Hanford Nuclear Site. Schools, libraries, and businesses in Richland will take advantage of the additional fiber from downtown to north Richland.

Benton PUD offers fiber to businesses in Kennewick, Prosser, Benton City, and now Richland via an open access model. Residential wireless is also available in Prosser, Pesco and Kennewick with five retail providers on the network.

According to the article, Benton PUD will also use the fiber for its advanced metering system. From the article:

"This agreement allows Benton PUD to increase its capacity and redundancy, while also helping the Hanford project," Rick Dunn, PUD director of engineering, said in a statement.

The fiber also provides additional capacity for the Hanford Federal Cloud, a system that allows Hanford information to be stored at centralized and consolidated data centers rather than on individual worker's computers. The fiber serves several DOE facilities connected to Hanford.

"Having a fast, reliable communications infrastructure is critical in supporting Hanford's cleanup mission," Ben Ellison, DOE's Hanford chief information officer, said in a statement. "This project gives DOE the capacity it needs to further the mission and allows for future growth of both the community and Hanford cleanup activities."

While the DOE sees the fiber as an asset in the ongoing clean up of the decommissioned nuclear production complex, local leaders see it as an opportunity to bring more business to the area. Richalnd and southern Washington are also known for low power rates, another feature attractive to potential businesses. As clean-up winds down at Hanford, Richland is looking to the future and wisely using fiber as a way to reach out for commercial opportunities.

San Jose launched its new, publicly owned, downtown free Wi-Fi on March 14th. This is the community's third attempt at bringing a successful free service to downtown and city officials have made much ado about the new "Wickedly Fast Wi-Fi Network." The city teamed up with SmartWAVE Technologies and Ruckus Wireless to design and install the $94,000 network. Ongoing costs are estimated at $22,000 per year.

From the press release, reprinted in PR Newswire:

"Utilizing our Smart Wi-Fi technology, this Wickedly Fast Wi-Fi Network offers the fastest public Wi-Fi service in the country, and we’re proud to be a part of enabling that,” said Selina Lo, president and CEO of Ruckus Wireless. “On a smartphone, a user will be able to experience speeds of anywhere from two to three Megabits per second. This is easily three to four times faster than any other public network service,” Lo concludes. “There’s a huge, growing demand around the country, and the world, for more reliable public and managed Wi-Fi services to satisfy an exploding population of users now armed with multiple smart mobile devices, and where better to help satisfy that demand than starting with the Capital of Silicon Valley.”

The network will also speed up parking transactions in the City's downtown parking system and support downtown city government facilities.

In a KTVU report, Vijay Sammetta, Chief INformation Officer for San Jose described the new Wi-fi:

"Typically we see municipal a thousand or two-thousand miles per hour in layman's terms," said Vijay Sammeta, San Jose's Chief Information Officer.  "We're upping that ante up to 10,000 miles per hour."

Update: The Wall Street Jounal has also just covered the recent proliferation of community owned Wi-Fi networks.

Last summer, the city of Staunton, Virginia, sent out a press release about its new citywide free wi-fi service. Four hours later, a destructive storm ripped through Gypsy Hill Park knocking down trees and damaging buildings. Nevertheless, the equipment held on. Five days later, celebrants at the city's July 4th party used the free service in droves.

A William Jackson GCN article from December, 2012, highlights the popularity of the network:

Wi-Fi use in the park had begun well before the formal launch. Almost as soon as installation of the access points began in May, park workers noticed people congregating with their laptops in areas near the points, Plowman said, demonstrating the demand for Wi-Fi access.

Public Wi-Fi has become a popular feature at the park. “People are finding creative uses for it,” [chief technology officer for Staunton, Kurt] Plowman said, such as the woman who used a laptop Web camera to send a ball game in the park to a player’s grandmother.

As we have seen in other communities, a wireless network enhances local connectivity as a complement to a fiber network. Staunton is the County seat of Augusta and home to nearly 25,000 people.

The City owns two separate networks. In addition to the fiber used by city facilities, there is a separate dark fiber network. The city installed the dark fiber with the intention of leasing it to the Staunton Economic Development Authority. The Authority then leases it to local phone, Internet, and wireless provider, MGW. MGW serves residential and commercial customers in south and west Virginia.

In 2012, the city built a new fiber institutional network to avoid having to lease from the private sector.

We touched base with Kurt Plowman who told us that the fiber connects twelve major city facilities, including libraries, fires stations, and public works facilities. There are also over fifty traffic signal cabinets and ten facilities in Gypsy Hill Park on the fiber.

When compared with the city's past lease payments for fiber and data circuits, payback will be complete in 10 years. Additionally, there are more facilities connected and bandwidth is increased.

This past week, we’ve had quite the discussion around Cecilia Kang’s WashPo piece describing a plan by the FCC to create a national WiFi network by making the right decisions about how to allocate spectrum between licenses for auction and what to leave available for the unlicensed TV white spaces (“TVWS” aka “Super WiFi” aka “Wifi on steroids”). As Kang describes, the FCC’s opening of sufficient spectrum for TVWS could lead to “super WiFi networks (emphasis added) around the nation so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.” Needless to say, the article faced much pushback, despite a subsequent Washpo clarification to indicate the FCC was not, actually, planing to build a network. Amidst the various critics, there were some general defenders of the concept.

Really, I think the cable business in the U.S. looks very attractive. It looks like the telcos are not going to aggressively overbuild cable with fiber and so, cable has a definite advantage when comes to high speed broadband, which seems to be something the public is totally in love with. ... But no, I think cable is very strong on the broadband side and I think the threat of wireless broadband taking away high speed connectivity is way overblown. There just is not enough bandwidth on the wireless side to substantially damage cable's unique ability to delivery very high speed connectivity. So I think everybody is going to do well in this mix.

Credit to Susan Crawford's new book, Captive Audience, where I read it first.

Photo courtesy of JSquish via Wikipedia Commons

In 2007, the City of Amherst, Massachusetts received a $150,000 grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build a wireless mesh network. DARPA and NSF have long been interested in developing mesh networks that are more resilient than traditional hub and spoke type networks.

The City IT Department, UMass Amherst Office of Information Technology Department, DARPA and NSF collaborated to deploy the network that now covers much of the city.

According to GazetteNet.com, the city is now investing another $50,000 to upgrade the system which now extends a mile through downtown. From the article:

“We definitely have the fastest and largest outdoor Wi-Fi network in the state,” said Information Technology Director Kristopher Pacunas.

The new system, which replaces aging equipment that was part of a smaller municipal Wi-Fi system, will be a boon to those who live, work and shop in downtown Amherst, said Pacunas, who anticipates as many as 2,000 different people will use the system daily.

“We’ve seen data in the short time we’ve had this (that) people will come to downtown areas with free Wi-Fi,” Pacunas said.

While the new upgrades were not officially launched until the start of 2013, Pacunas said that over 10,400 people used the system in the weeks leading up to the new year. Pacunas also notes that the network has limited functionality indoors, being designed mostly for public outdoor spaces downtown.

 The Town of Amherst Public WiFi website describes how the design was meant to blend in with the look of the city and the light and utility poles that house the access points. There are 30 wireless mesh access points and burst speeds up to 80 Mbps. This is another example of how a municipal network can create direct benefits AND indirect benefits simply through its implementation. Also from the article:

Alex Krogh-Grabbe, director of the Amherst Business Improvement District, said he sees the benefits of the system.