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10/03/2006No Stone Unturned in San Francisco Wi-Fi
San Francisco has generated considerable attention from broadband-wireless stakeholders around the world ever since EarthLink and partner Google bid to provide the city with an ubiquitous Wi-Fi infrastructure, in part through a two-tiered advertising-based model supporting free public access.
Chris Vein, Senior Technology Advisor to the Mayor of San Francisco and Executive Director of the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services, is heading up the City’s negotiations with EarthLink. At the W2i Digital Cities Convention in London , Olympia Exhibition Centre, September 25–26, 2006, he joined participating IT professionals and field practitioners from municipal agencies from the U.K., Europe, and the U.S. presenting their plans and experiences deploying broadband-wireless applications and services in their communities. The following is adapted from his remarks.
It was in October of 2004 that my boss, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, put out a big audacious goal. He made a statement in his first State of the City address that said that every San Franciscan should have a computer and access to the Internet and no San Franciscan should be without access to free wireless-broadband service.
I happened to be in the audience that day, and I wasn’t in my current position, and I remember thinking, Oh, the poor devil who’s going to have make that promise a reality. And it turns out the next month that I became that person, and for the last two years I’ve been on an incredible journey in making what was a visionary statement — I don’t believe Mayor Newsom actually quite understood everything that was implied by that statement — but two years later, and quite a bit of work and publicity, we are at a stage of negotiating with EarthLink, Motorola and Tropos to provide ubiquitous access to all 49 square miles of the City and County of San Francisco.
Before I jump to where we are with the contract negotiations, I think it might be useful for you to hear a little bit about San Francisco and what the TechConnect program is. I’m very excited to hear what’s going on here [in the U.K.] because I probably will take back some of the lessons learned here and apply them to my own case in San Francisco.
What we’ve been doing over the past two years is creating a project called Project TechConnect. When the mayor made his statement about providing free wireless-broadband service, it was with the intent of insuring digital inclusion, or the old term “bridging the digital divide.” We are very lucky in San Francisco — we are an incredibly rich city and county with access to an incredible amount of talent. Yet one third of the citizens of the City and County of San Francisco don’t have access to broadband service, and roughly 40 percent in some neighborhoods don’t have computers or have never used computers, which is a scary statistic for a place like San Francisco.
So what we’ve decided to do is create another program — not another government program, but a program where we’re connecting what already exists: the service providers, the money, with people who need it, and the government is simply the catalyst for bringing those two sets of organizations together.
We’re focusing on four main areas: access to the Internet, and once there is access making sure people have or can get low-cost computers. That there’s focused content and community content — making sure that once that access and use of a computer is there that what is accessed is actually useful to the people who are using it. And last but not least training and support to make sure that the broadband access works.
We’re doing that through a number of pilot projects. We are reaching out to our schools, doing a lot with digital media, trying to attract and entice younger people — students — into what technology can bring to digital media. We’re finding it happens to be one of the best draw-ins. We’re working with research organizations, U.C. Berkeley, developing a wonderful partnership with them to showcase what can be done on networks, and moving forward very quickly.
We decided to do something a little bit different in San Francisco. We did a request for information and comment back in October of last year to find out what the citizens of the City and County of San Francisco wanted and also to test out whether free broadband-wireless service was even feasible. We received enough responses to tell us yes, there was support for the idea, and yes, there was the possibility that a business model exists for free Wi-Fi service. We then followed that RFI/C with an RFP, received six proposals, narrowed that down to three, and based on a rather extensive set of criteria, ranked those three and selected, based on points, EarthLink, with their partners Google, Tropos, and Motorola.
On May 26, we decided to commence and begin negotiations with EarthLink, and we have been weekly, if not daily, in negotiations since then. Many of you may understand that there is always a push by the boss to get things done very quickly, and there is a push both from the mayor but also from my vendor partners to get this project under way and a deal negotiated as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, in San Francisco, we have some interesting public issues around things like privacy, digital inclusion, and net neutrality, and we find ourselves negotiating the deal with a great deal of public announcement and communication. After every meeting that we have with EarthLink and their partners we must post on our Web site a synopsis of everything discussed. And when we get to the point of actually exchanging documents, we must post those documents on the Web itself.
So it’s creating an interesting environment and a challenge to be negotiating a deal very much in the public, very much with public involvement…. [T]here are certain…supervisors who believe it should be a municipally owned system. If you are not aware of what we’re doing in San Francisco, we’re doing a public-private partnership, and basically we are offering access to rights-of-way in exchange for EarthLink to come in and design, build, implement, operate, maintain and support a wireless system. The system has two levels. One is free at a certain rate, and at a higher rate access is roughly $19.99 a month.
It’s been interesting to see what’s happening in the market as we’ve introduced this concept, because in the United States — or in San Francisco, anyway — there are basically two main providers of service. There’s the cable company, and the traditional phone company. So basically we’re introducing a third entrant, and providing some real competition, and it’s actually having quite an impact. We’re seeing both cable and traditional telephone companies bringing their prices down, and, interestingly enough, prices down just below what we think we’re going to be offering our service with this third entrant.
So we hope to complete negotiations by November, have a deal ready to take to our Board of Supervisors for review and comment and final approval, and then we will begin implementation and build-out next year with a phase-by-phase approach to cover all 49 square miles of the City and County of San Francisco.
So, it’s an exciting project. It’s a project that has certainly taken on a life of its own — much bigger than I ever though it would — and I certainly have learned a lot. But I think we’re getting much closer to making the mayor’s dream a reality, by providing that free wireless service, and introducing some interesting economic models and interesting discussion about the very role of the Internet and the very content that is provided through the Internet.
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Related Items:
• S.F. Citywide Wi-Fi Plan Fizzles as Provider Backs Off
• Chris Vein, CIO, San Francisco (CA)
• San Francisco '05
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