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The Twirling Botanist

Some Things Considered

Shepherdstown has joined a growing national list of municipalities that offer wireless internet access to residents and visitors alike. It was only a few years ago that we started hearing about Wi-Fi hotspots being offered to patrons of coffeehouses and hotels as a way to access the internet. Initially these services were fee-based, but many have evolved to become free in the hopes of luring customers who buy other services that subsidize the Wi-Fi feature. The problem with traditional Wi-Fi hotspots, free or otherwise, is their limited coverage area. Though a library or coffeehouse hotspot may offer free access, if you walk down the street a few hundred feet, you are unlikely to be able to connect to the service because signals naturally weaken with distance.

Enter Frontier Citywide. This recently installed service essentially turns Shepherdstown into a giant hotspot. The aim is to provide consistent Wi-Fi connectivity to subscribers when they are within the coverage area, which is currently the footprint of the town plat and slightly beyond. If you become a customer, this means that you can use the service from within the coverage area, i.e., the town. Though many are likely to use it only from within their home, they will have the luxury of connecting their laptop to the internet whether in their living room or upstairs office or on their back porch. If portability is your thing, you can also use your account to access the service while sitting at the Rumsey Monument, near the elementary school, in the Sheetz parking lot, or any other place within the coverage area.

The system is extremely cutting edge and goes technologically well beyond the low-end Wi-Fi devices for sale at electronics stores. For the über-geeks among us, this type of metropolitan wireless system, invented in 2000, is comprised of approximately 35 Tropos Networks MetroMesh routers mounted onto telephone poles at approximately 800-foot intervals. These devices not only provide the necessary connectivity for your Mac or PC but also serve to distribute data throughout a dynamically changing “mesh” that modifies itself as conditions change. This means that if some new source of interference is introduced, for example, at the corner of High and King streets, the mesh system will automatically reconfigure itself around the interference “obstruction.” You as the user shouldn’t notice a difference.

But mesh networks are a nascent technology and have not been without their growing pains. The town of Chaska, Minn., population 23,000, was an early adopter of a Tropos mesh that initially did not work so well. It took 18 months or more to really get it working, but since then perhaps half of all homes are now subscribers at a cost of $17 per month. That’s pretty good success. My prediction is that Shepherdstown will be a beneficiary of the lessons learned in the early years of mesh networking, and our system will work better because more bugs will have been worked out. At least let’s hope so.

According to Brigid Smith, a public relations specialist for Citizens Communications Company, Frontier’s parent company, Shepherdstown was chosen as a candidate for Wi-Fi mesh because it fits the right profile—a small, well defined downtown area and a thriving educational and professional community. Other Wi-Fi mesh systems have been built by Frontier in Charles Town as well as in a few communities in Tennessee, New York, Illinois, and California. Smith paraphrased comments are, “The service is targeted as a supplement to existing Frontier dial-up or DSL internet access service users. The value is in the convenience Wi-Fi can add by allowing our customers that already have DSL to be able to connect wirelessly if they are somewhere else in their town or in the other towns where it is installed.” While interviewing Frontier, it was clear to me that in the future they also intend to offer Citywide as a stand-alone service and will not require subscribers to have any other type of internet service.

The Citywide system uses part of an FCC unlicensed radio frequency spectrum called the Industrial, Scientific and Medical Band widely used by consumer electronics, phones, and microwave ovens. An unlicensed spectrum like this can be used by anyone as long as the equipment meets stringent rules for power levels and antenna types. According to my research, the Citywide Tropos system complies with FCC rules. Since an unlicensed spectrum is used, the town cannot legally lay claim to the airwaves and demand that Frontier pay us for them as they have as much right to their use as do you or your neighbor.

With regard to whether Citywide will cause interference with existing home Wi-Fi systems, the answer is an unequivocal “It depends.” It is quite possible that the Citywide system may interfere with your home setup if both use the same Wi-Fi channel. The reason: the mesh systems at the telephone poles use power levels that exceed a typical home Wi-Fi system. This is done because the waves have farther to travel and must penetrate the walls of your home. On the other hand, it may not interfere with your personal Wi-Fi, in which case, great! At the risk of making this article too technical, the simple advice is that if you believe your personal Wi-Fi system seems slow this may be due to interference. The solution may be as simple as changing the Wi-Fi channel to either 1, 6, or 11. If it is on channel 6, try channel 1, which is generally less congested in Shepherdstown. If you don’t know how to change the channel, refer to your equipment’s documentation. If you still have no idea what I am talking about, call your most technically minded friend.

I conducted an informal test in which I drove along every street in town to roughly measure the Wi-Fi coverage and connection speed. Results show that for the most part coverage is pretty good, with a few “holes” here and there. The following are the extreme edges of the coverage, with most parts inside this area offering a decent signal: fire station, entrance to the Clarion, elementary school, O’Hurley’s, day care center, Rumsey Monument, and boat ramp. I observed download speeds commensurate with a typical slow DSL line one might see installed in a home. One future concern is how fast the system would be if there were many subscribers concurrently accessing the network. If speeds become too slow, subscribers may need to apply pressure to Frontier to add more mesh routers to accommodate the load.

My greatest concern with Citywide is its price. Clearly there are real costs with installing and maintaining Citywide, and thinking that the service will be free, as some people have wished, is impractical. Chaska residents pay $17 per month with no binding contracts because they areable to leverage economies of scale with a large population of perhaps 11,000 subscribers. In contrast, the minimum Citywide subscriber price is $30 per month now and requires a long-term contract. This number is derived by a required bundling of their dial-up internet at $20 per month, with Citywide as an add-on service at $10 per month. This means that if you want Citywide you must first have dial-up or DSL service in your home. According to Maggie Quinn, director of wireless sales for Frontier, they realize that this may hamper adoption, and they are working on a la carte pricing for their internet offerings. Hopefully we will see prices at or near the Chaska range if you want Citywide only. Also of note are the on-demand temporary access passes to Citywide that range in price from $5 for one hour to $22 per week. While interviewing Frontier, I told them these prices are too steep for the casual user and should be reduced.

Frontier is not the only internet provider. For comparison, Comcast offers cable internet access for $43 per month. Though it costs more, the speed is much faster than Citywide, and if you need wireless in your home, simply add your own wireless access point. With a Comcast solution you forego the convenience of connecting anywhere in town. In another example, if you have an AT&T/Cingular, Verizon, or Sprint cell phone, you can get a “wireless broadband” laptop card for about $40 per month and take the internet with you on the road. Just make sure those major carriers cover Shepherdstown.

Those concerned about the health effects of radio frequencies should realize that the greater the power the greater the danger. Though Wi-Fi uses the same frequency ranges as your microwave oven and 2.4 Ghz wireless telephone, the power levels for Wi-Fi are far lower, as mandated by the FCC. For example, a typical laptop wireless antenna will generate no more than 60 milliwatts of power, versus your microwave which produces around 600 watts. If you do the math, the microwave oven is 10,000 times more powerful and properly designed to prevent the “rays” from escaping and harming the chef. Therefore the rule of thumb is always to heat your leftovers in the microwave and not next to your laptop’s wireless antenna, as the latter method always leaves the food cold.

If you elect to switch to the Citywide service (or even if you don’t), you should always take proper precautions to protect your computer and your personal data contained therein from unauthorized access. This is especially important with Citywide, because systems that are connected to it are not sitting snugly behind a firewall but are instead directly part of the Wild West environment that is the internet. Not to worry though. To protect yourself, simply take these safe computing precautions to reduce the chances of problems. First, be aware that if you use Citywide—or any other “open” wireless access point for that matter—your communication to the internet is not scrambled (encrypted) between you and the access point. This means that someone with the right equipment, parked in the alley behind your home, can eavesdrop on what systems you access.

One way to prevent exposure of your data while it is “in the air” is to access your email or remote websites with “https://...” at the beginning of the web address. Second, block unauthorized access to your computer by always using personal firewall software, which is built in to recent versions of both Mac OS and Windows and as third-party add-on software. Third, periodically check for software fixes and patches as they become available. A month usually does not pass without at least one Windows fix; Macs, though not immune, have fewer updates. Fourth, purchase and install a well regarded anti-virus / anti-spyware software to mitigate the effects of “malicious code.” My current personal favorite for my Windows XP laptop is Webroot Spy Sweeper with Anti-virus. It works well, is inexpensive, and doesn’t bog down my machine.
To connect to the Citywide service, enable your computer’s wireless card and scan for available wireless networks. If you are within range, you will see “FrontierCitywide” as a network to which you can connect. If you have trouble with this, again, your tech-guru friends are often helpful here. Once connected, simply open an internet browser, which will redirect you to Frontier’s “portal” page. It is here that you can create an account and provide credit card payment information via a secure encrypted connection.

I have high hopes for Citywide. It scores a 10 on the “neat-o” index and demonstrates that a large business, Frontier, sees our town as a model for a new type of digital connectivity. I am concerned, though, that the combination of mid to low-level performance and a price that isn’t exactly cheap will discourage adopters. Frontier needs to ensure that the system works as well as it possibly can. It also needs to make a more compelling case to our residents in the form of a no-strings-attached cost of $22 or less per month. Only then will the Citywide Wi-Fi mesh be a success.

Grant Moerschel (gm@wavegard.com) is a local resident and co-principal of WaveGard, Inc., a consulting firm that serves corporations and governments and specializes in information security, network engineering, and wireless technology training. He is co-author of the McGraw-Hill Certified Wireless Security Professional Official Study Guide, Second Edition. More information is available at www.wavegard.com.

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New City Wide Wi-Fi a Model for Other Towns