Wi-Fi

Photo courtesy of Elysse Preposi

Breakout participants working at Pier 17.

On a recent Friday morning, on the third floor deck of the Pier 17 mall at South Street Seaport, where visitors were lazing in wooden lawn chairs and soaking up rays as a large blue sail boat bobbed gently in the sparkling East River in front of them, it was safe to assume that the last thing anyone would have wanted to do—or think about—was work.

But work was precisely why about 10 members of the city’s tech community had gathered there.

They were conducting the second in a series of beta sessions for Breakout, a month-long public work festival being planned as part of the Architectural League of New York’s fall exhibition, “Toward the Sentient City,” which will explore how different forms of media can inform and influence urban public space.

The idea of Breakout (as in: “Break out of the office”) is to generate buzz about the potential for doing work (as in the type of work by which one earns his or her living) in New York City’s public spaces, ideally those that are outdoors and have access to free wireless Internet. So for a month, from September 17 through October 16, the organizers will be setting up temporary work stations, or “breakouts”—some of them complete with portable furniture, collaboration software, printers, electrical power and other workplace necessities—in parks, pedestrian plazas, sidewalks, subway stations and places like the deck at Pier 17 mall.

Black Web 2.0, an Internet industry news site covering the African American community, published an item yesterday about the organization Wireless Harlem—which is working to increase broadband access in Harlem and close the neighborhood's "digital divide"—and its executive director, Michael Lewis.

Here's a re-cap of some of the initiatives Wireless Harlem is working on:

In Lewis, Harlem has a necessary advocate who goes to bat for them on broadband and other issues related to wireless access. WHI’s most successful program is Tech Saturdays, which provides Harlem families with free home computers (refurbished Macs and PCs) and instruction ranging from the use of open source applications to Internet safety to online honesty. Children’s Storefront (an independent, free school) is WHI’s primary partner in this venture as well as the provider of the venue for Tech Saturdays.The program is open to families with a child in grade 4 or above, and most recently started providing families of children K-3 with alphasmarts.

Last year, WHI retained Civitium, LLC, the market-leading consulting firm for community broadband initiatives to perform a wireless broadband feasibility study for the community of Harlem, New York. WHI believes this study will provide “the necessary foundation for potential roll-out of a community-wide broadband network.”

As you may have already heard, The Wall Street Journal has a piece about how cafes are scaling back, or pulling the plug entirely, on free Wi-Fi as a result of the economic downturn. In other words, since more people are unemployed, more people are hanging around coffee shops to use the Internet looking for jobs or doing freelance work or what not. The coffee shops are losing money as a result, hence measures like laptop restrictions or all-out bans, and even the locking of electrical outlets.

"Laptop backlash," as WSJ calls it, is particularly problematic in New York:

In New York, the trend is accelerating among independents. At Cocoa Bar locations in Brooklyn and on the Manhattan's Lower East Side, a five-month-old rule forbids laptops after 8 on Friday and Saturday nights. At Espresso 77 in Jackson Heights, Queens, owners covered three of five electric outlets six months ago after its loosely enforced laptop-use restrictions failed to encourage turnover. At two of three Café Grumpy locations -- one in Brooklyn and the other in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood -- laptops are never welcome.

Laptop backlash poses particular difficulties for people without offices, says Leah Meyerhoff, 29, a film director and free-lancer. She long has used coffee shops to interview cast and crew and to work on pre-production. Now, she says, "it's a constant search for places with the Internet where I can sit and focus without being frowned upon."

If nothing else, the coffee shop Wi-Fi shortage highlights the need for more wireless hotspots in New York's public places, which is something the tech community is pushing for as the city readies its application for stimulus funding through the Broadband Technology and Opportunities Program.

NYCwireless

We weren't able to make it to this morning's launch of a new free Wi-Fi hotspot in Clinton Hill, but NYCwireless has posted some photos and video from the event.

The installation, located in a community park and playground on the corner of Classon and Lafayette avenues, is the first free Wi-Fi hotspot in a low-income New York City neighborhood, according to NYCwireless, a nonprofit organization that has also set up hotspots in Bryant Park, Madison Square Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park. It was set up in collaboration with a neighborhood services organization and an N.G.O., the goal being to bring free wireless Internet to underserved children.

You can view a series of photos of kids surfing the Web during the event here, and below check out some video of a few of them talking to a NY1 reporter about being able to use the Internet in a park. (Sound is a bit muffled.)

As we've been reporting, the city is gearing up to acquire stimulus funds that would help close the gap in the broadband adoption rate between low-income households (it was 28 percent as of 2006-2007) and moderate- to high-income households across the five boroughs. Some of those funds would be used to add more free public Wi-Fi hotspots like this latest one in Clinton Hill.

NYCwireless, a nonprofit dedicated to the spread of free public wireless Internet, is about to launch what it says will be the first free Wi-Fi hotspot in a low-income neighborhood in New York City. The launch is scheduled for 11 a.m. on July 31 at Brooklyn's Classon Playground, near the corner of Classon and Lafayette Avenues in Clinton Hill, according to a press release sent last night, July 21, by Dana Spiegel, the executive director of NYC Wireless.

The new Wi-Fi installation is a collective effort between NYCwireless (which has built free wireless hotspots at various city parks including Bryant Park, Madison Square Park, and Brooklyn Bridge Park), the Brooklyn-based neighborhood-services organization Child Development Support Corp., and the private N.G.O. Harlowtown, which sponsors community projects in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

From the release:

Today, July 14, marks the beginning of a grant application process for broadband funding under the federal stimulus bill. Here's a little bit about what's at stake.

The stimulus is providing a total of $7.2 billion in broadband funds to be allocated by various agencies through various programs aimed alternately at rural and urban areas. The program that matters most to New York City right now is the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), which, with $4.7 billion, is designed to support broadband infrastructure in underserved areas. The city wants to get a slice of a roughly $450 million subset of these funds to create in-home broadband adoption programs and make technology upgrades at public computing centers.

Currently, broadband adoption isn't getting much media coverage outside of the wireless industry and business press. But, in New York City, tech and Internet initiatives are becoming increasingly important to both city life and city government, even as the adoption rate lags in some communities.

M.T.A.

New York City commuters take note: It looks like Metro North and the Long Island Rail Road are becoming broadband-friendly.

MuniWireless reports that the M.T.A. and L.I.R.R. have issued a Request for Expressions of Interest for wireless broadband deployment in trains and stations, a move, the Web site notes, that is consistent with an increase in public transport companies providing Wi-Fi to passengers to entice them away from car commuting. (Sounds like Mayor Bloomberg would love that.)

They have the full document embedded in PdF form here, but scroll down for an excerpt.

The R.F.E.I. is dated July 1, although M.T.A. officials mentioned it back in June after Sen. Chuck Schumer criticized L.I.R.R. for lagging on providing Wi-Fi for riders.

Dana Spiegel of NYCWireless weighs in with some context:

Back in may, the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications put out a Request for Information seeking ideas about bringing free WiFi to 40 hot spots in 32 parks and public spaces across the five boroughs. (There used to be 17 free WiFi hotspots in 11 city parks until the company that was supporting the ad-supported service went out of business in 2004.)

If you're curious what a free WiFi model might look like, the non-profit organization NYC Wireless has posted its response to the city's RFI on its Web site. One point worth noting is the group's insistence that another ad-based plan is not the best way forward:

NYCwireless fundamentally believes and the industry has seen countless times (including the companies MetroFi and EarthLink, and cities San Francisco and Portland, for example) that Ad-based business models are unsustainable for individual hotspots and even reasonable sized hotspot networks. If DoITT and the City want to really ensure that free public Wi-Fi should be made available, and that locations other than the most highly trafficked and well-to-do are served, they need to step up and offer alternative funding models.

They also propose individually choosing local providers for each park to address each park's unique challenges and needs, assisting business improvement districts with the creation of new hot spots, and reaching out to community, state, federal and private sources for funding. Read the full document after the jump.

You might not be able to pick up WiFi in the city's parks (for now, at least), but you can pick it up in some of the planes flying over them!

PSFK's Pier Fawkes wrote the following review of Virgin America’s WiFi enabled jet from a flight into JFK:

This report is filed from the JFK to NYC flight on Virgin America’s WiFi enabled jet. We thought we’d try out “air-fi” to see how it worked. First impressions are great - there’s simple upload and download of email, easy access to the web. As you do use it you get to notice some of issues from the slower connections which you’d probably expect - YouTube videos buffer for a long while, for example. There’s also some trickery going on behind the scenes to manage data volume - I’m writing this from PSFK’s web-based publishing platform not from my desk-top as I usually do. The plane seems to be stopping me from uploading posts from desktop publishing software Ecto and I wonder if over the course of my $12.95 WiFi experience I’ll start to notice other aspects that hinder my work.

Nevertheless - power outlets and decent Wifi is a big plus to a journey across the country. I was able to do all my RSS morning scan at the same time I normally do - which sets up my day fine and doesn’t mean that when I land I won’t feel like the constant need to catch up - and I can just get on with my day.

Flickr via e53

Would you like to use your laptop here?
(Central Park).

Some potentially good news for anyone who likes the idea of updating their blogs and Facebook accounts outdoors, as in on an actual laptop computer, perhaps while lounging on the grass or under the shade of a tree: The city is looking into bringing free wireless Internet back to parks and other public places.

The New York Post reports that the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications has issued a request for information seeking "ideas about providing free WiFi service at 40 hot spots in 32 parks and public spaces in all five boroughs."

According to the Post, a company called WiFi Salon had provided advertiser-supported service at 17 hot spots in 11 parks in every borough but Staten Island from late 2004 until last December, when it went out of business and the city concluded that its arrangement with the company didn't make sense in the first place. Now the city is looking for suggestions on ways to both turn a profit and keep WiFi free for users, a prospect that Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who chairs the council's Committee on Technology in Government, said would require both advertising revenue and city funding.