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04/19/2007Innovation Center a Cornerstone of Boston RFI
“We are thrilled and somewhat overwhelmed by the response and the great number of companies in the room today,” said CEO Pam Reeve as she kicked off OpenAir Boston’s pre-RFI conference on Wednesday, April 11, in downtown Boston. About sixty vendor representatives and interested parties gathered in the top-floor conference room at 111 Hungtington Ave., behind the Prudential Center, with a view toward the Charles River and the major universities a new broadband-wireless network for Boston would, in no small part, serve to stimulate and excite.
While a goal of OpenAir Boston is to spur digital inclusion across the City of Boston—the design is a wholesale network supporting up to twenty retail service providers—the all-volunteer nonprofit’s top concern is economic development and innovation for metro Boston, its universities, and greater New England. A major part of OpenAir’s Request for Information—issued on April 2 and amended on April 17—is a WIC, or Wireless Innovation Center, that brings all this together. Any respondent seeking OpenAir’s serious attention will need to answer to it.
“Our first goal is to incent economic development and innovation,” said Reeve, who was appointed by Mayor Thomas Menino to create openairboston.net, in partnership with the City, and implement the vision of the city’s Wireless Task Force. “They go hand in hand, and there are elements that sync up, and we don’t think building that low-cost ubiquitous wireless alone will make that happen…. Support for the WIC is key to the innovation and economic development goals and it adds complexity.”
Beyond the goals of economic development/innovation and digital inclusion, a third goal of providing services to the city itself—and the cost benefits and service enhancements this could provide—was a somewhat distant third, ceding mindshare to the WIC.
“We’ve been light on the city requirements in this discussion today, but we’ve been working with the city on this,” Reeve concluded during an extended Q&A period with attendees. “We’d be quite interested in your thoughts about that. There are probably 5,000 to 6,000 mobile workers in the city, and issues with departments not communicating with other departments, there are costs to be wrung out, and there are applications to be deployed…. We are extremely hopeful that the city will be a customer of OpenAir Boston, nor do we count on that or rely on that to achieve our goals, but if the network is built out as you see in the RFI, it will be attractive to the city for a lot of its needs.”
The Wireless Innovation Center will be a consortium, but with a prime anchor university. “We want this WIC to support R&D and to support entrepreneurship,” said OpenAir Boston’s Stephen Pearse, former CEO of Cyras Systems which was sold to Ciena Corporation for $2.7B. “It will have an open architecture development and testing approach. Sponsors will have access to this new technology. If the result is open source, fine. We want a rich environment for spinouts. We need more spinouts—technology, software, and hardware companies based in the New England.”
RFI respondents are invited to submit a plan for hosting, building and managing the WIC, such that it will serve as a test bed for innovation and generate a low-cost yet high-performing network “better than what has been seen to date.” The WIC will work hand in hand with a Network Operations Center, or NOC, with a “quality” wall, or firewall, between the two. It will support a university’s academic goals and satisfy a “hunger for operations experience,” Pearse said.
“We’re going to use this academic strength—students and faculty—to help make sure Boston and New England become a worldwide leader in wireless innovation,” he said. “We will host entrepreneurial endeavors so that people who graduate from here can get a job here.”
Clear to the vendors in the room—BelAir Networks, EarthLink Municipal Networks, Galaxy Internet Services, IBM, Northrop Grumman, and Tropos Networks, among others, asked questions—was that RFI respondents with the best plan for the WIC would shape OpenAir’s RFP and probably be best positioned to win a bid. System integrators and service providers therefore are in the best position to respond.
“Is the committee going to issue an RFP?” asked Martin Levetin, Vice President, Carrier and Municipal Networks, Strix Systems. “Will respondents of the RFP be limited to those who responded to the RFI?”
“You don’t need to be a respondent to the RFI to respond to the RFP,” Reeve said. “We hope you’ll respond to the RFI to shape that RFP.”
“We’re looking for your wisdom and knowledge,” Pearse added. “We’re not saying this is a must, either, but it’s definitely a very strong want and need. You’re going to get a lot more credit and viability in your response the closer you come to meeting these goals. We’re not looking for the same things you’ve bid on in the past.”
“We struggled—we ended up going with a very large RFI to start that debate and dialogue,” said James Daniell, OpenAir’s Cabinet Leader. “If we can get a response back that nails our goals, we will track an RFP very quickly.”
Services to Citizens and Businesses
To deploy broadband services to Boston’s residents and businesses, OpenAir Boston will sit in the middle to incent what would be a competitive environment, selling wholesale to about twenty service-provider middlemen. “The way we have thought about the network allows us to take a phased approach, in two to three components,” Reeve said. “The backhaul plan should be designed extraordinarily well, with capacity. We don’t see a lot of change here versus the applications to consumers, where the innovation is occurring before our very eyes, where it seems like you’re behind every four to six months. So we want to be built for that flexibility on the access side. We don’t want to build a network and find we’re obsolete after the network has been hung.”
On the digital-inclusion front, Reeve cited a 1.1-square-mile pilot project in Roxbury’s Dudley Square as an example of fact-finding on the city and local community groups’ inclusion challenges. The area has about a 15,000 population, 10 schools, and 2 subway stops, and serves as “a good microcosm of the underserved area of Boston,” she said. “We’re getting real-world deployment experience in this first square mile so we can make things smoother when we go to the whole city…. We are starting off with a 30-day free period, and offering service at $10 a month, and using a guerrilla marketing effort, offering free to schools at first.”
Thinking citywide, however, accessing Boston’s 64,000 light poles to deploy wireless infrastructure is a nightmare in the making. Some are owned by the city, some aren’t. Reeve said: “64,000 light poles in the City of Boston, 64,000 stories in the City of Boston. Some don’t have power, and it’s hard to find the light poles that have power in the areas that you want them.” Information on the assets the city owns and manages is not all electronically managed, so OpenAir Boston will work with the city to do updates, including the redevelopment authority, housing , public schools, health, public works, transportation, MIS legal facility management, and property management—“so when we go scale it will go smoothly.”
In its planning, OpenAir took into consideration the wide variation in user bases and infrastructure characteristics throughout the city, asking how multiple service providers could satisfy the need.
“We took apart the city down to the parcel level,” said Michael Tattersall, who did OpenAir’s network design modeling. “There are almost three networks within the network. There are a large proportion of buildings under four stories, made of wood, which have different properties versus a tower,” he said. As the terrain changes, “so do the economics, because the number of radios per square mile changes. We are not looking for the same network everywhere across the city—quite different according to local conditions.”
When quizzed about OpenAir’s relationship with the City of Boston, Reeve responded that it is a separate or private nonprofit corporation. “What we’re trying to do is marry the best of Boston.… We need to be financially sustainable, to refresh our small staff…. Anything beyond that will be funneled into a digital-inclusion program,” she said.
OpenAir Boston will take questions on its RFI through April 20 and provide answers by April 27. For proceedings from the pre-RFI meeting, visit http://www.openairboston.net/rfi/
Peter Orne is editorial director of the Wireless Internet Institute.
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