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11/09/2007Municipal Wi-Fi Public Access Debated in Italian Cities as Across Europe
At this year's Global Forum, which convened in Venice, Italy, on November 5–6, 2007, W2i hosted a series of Digital Cities Workshops sponsored by IBM that provided an opportunity for two dozen local authorities from Italy to Switzerland, Estonia to Spain, to brainstorm on the challenges of deploying broadband-wireless infrastructure in both rural and urban areas of Europe.
Overshadowing a discussion of an emerging regulatory framework around municipal wireless was a pervasive apprehension about the European Commission’s ultimate stance on public service provision by cities themselves, which must make a case for market failure in order to legally provide public Wi-Fi access.
To receive the go-ahead from the EC, the City of Prague will limit use of its planned network to government operations and a "walled garden." Accordingly, in a high-profile decision in May, the EC ruled that Prague's municipal wireless project did not involve state aid [under Article 87(1) of the EC Treaty] because no special advantage would be conferred on any private- or public-sector operator of the network.
But critics have countered that the network will therefore provide little benefit to a public seeking low-cost broadband Internet access.
EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said at the time: “Investment in broadband networks is primarily a matter for private companies. State subsidies for such networks are only acceptable if they address a well-defined market failure or cohesion problem. I am glad that the city council of Prague modified its plans so that the project can go ahead without distorting competition.”
In Venice, Jean-François Soupizet, Head of Unit for International Relations in the Information Society, EC Director General of INFSO, confirmed that the matter of municipal wireless, state aid, and competition still remains controversial and that, overall, the EC has not formulated a hard and fast position as yet. “It takes time for the directorates to confer with one another," he said.
Daniel Aghion, Executive Director of W2i, said: "Those projects that actually have shown market failure — such as the Basque Region in Spain and the Piedmont Region and Trentino Province in Italy — are getting their projects approved and funded by the EC. The onus appears to be upon cities to prove market failure, and cities like Prague and Bologna appear not to have done that."
Bologna Iperbole Wireless
"How do you deploy the networks without breaching the EU regulations?" asked Giuseppe Paruolo, Deputy Mayor for Health, Communication and ICT, for the City of Bologna, which has a metro-area population of one million and more than 100,000 students at the university. Not without controversy, Bologna has deployed a free downtown pilot network that it wants to expand.
“The recent claim of Prague demonstrates that cities are free to set up wireless networks only for purposes of public administration," Paruolo said. "This is not what we are willing to do. We have not yet implemented our idea, which is mainly to enlarge the coverage area at least to the whole center of the city. This is not possible because all the partners asked us to put money into this. So it's not clear. On one side, we have the EC saying it's a free market to develop in its own means, and on the other side we have the private sector asking for money to develop this for our citizens!"
Bologna is now trying to identify a business model that could eventually provide public access as a windfall benefit. "If you want to install a video camera, put wireless as the means for interconnecting the video and information systems so that you can...then use the network to provide services for citizens. In this way, we can have the target of a large municipal base and open the network to other providers, and also try to reconstruct from a bottom-up approach starting with an application.”
Piedmont Region WI-PIE Program
While the municipal Wi-Fi story may seem complex in cities like Bologna and Segrate, which also — controversially — provides free Wi-Fi Internet access in public spaces, a clearer picture may be seen in the mountainous Piedmont Region in Italy's northwest (capital: Turin). In 2002, a consortium of 54 members embarked on a five-year plan to bring total digital inclusion to 1,200 municipalities facing a long-term digital divide, including more than 600 villages with populations below 1,000.
Similar to the well-known Basque Government deployment operated by Euskaltel in Spain, the broadband infrastructure (fiber, Wi-Fi, WiMAX) is owned by government, and service is delivered through a public-private partnership model including some 16 providers at the last mile. The cost is around 100 M€ between 2002–2007 from the following funding sources:
• About 7 M€ are National Funds (CIPE)
• About 20 M€ are European Structural Funds
• About 10 M€ are Provincial Funds
• About 15 M€ are Private Contributions
• About 48 M€ are Regional Funds (ICT Regional Department Funds)
• About 250,00 € are PIC INTERREG IIIA-2000-2006 Funds (ALCOTRA)
"We had an agreement with Telecom Italia to reach more territory than could have been possible without an MOU," said Margherita Italiano of CSI Piemonte, which is responsible for the technical implementation of the WI-PIE program.
The regional backbone became operational in November 2006. It is owned by Regione Piemonte and operated by CSI Piemonte. A tender for the provincial infrastructure was released in September 2006 and the provincial sub-backbones will be finished by April 2008.
"We are using Wi-Fi, but it can't overlap on market action and interventions. We are guaranteeing technological neutrality and open access, and the network is open to local and national operators."
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