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| Wi-Fi and the City |
September 7, 2007 |
Proponents promise municipal Wi-Fi will revitalize economic activity and improve quality of life. So, is wireless benefiting Canada’s largest city yet?
By Trevor Marshall
 In her influential 1961 attack on city planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the late Jane Jacobs noted that, “city sidewalks—the pedestrian parts of the streets—serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians.”
Jacobs proceeded to describe the important role sidewalks play in the safety of a community, the creation of a city’s social fabric and the instruction of children as to the expectations of the society in which they live. “These uses are bound up with circulation but are not identical with it,” she argued, “and in their own right they are at least as basic as circulation to the proper working of cities.”
In 1968, Jacobs moved to Canada from the United States and, until her death in April 2006, she called Toronto home. As one might expect, she lived in a downtown neighbourhood—The Annex—that owes its continued success, in part, to the vibrancy of the life on its sidewalks.
Vibrancy via Wi-Fi
Late last year, downtown Toronto sidewalks became the stomping grounds for a new wireless network that promised to add a very contemporary vitality to urban life. In October, Toronto Hydro Telecom launched One Zone—an 802.11g high-speed Wi-Fi service that allows users to get online from any suitably equipped laptop, PDA or other wireless device.
One Zone covers some 235 blocks in Toronto’s core. It blankets the financial district, downtown entertainment areas, hotels, universities, municipal and provincial governments, and the city’s burgeoning medical and life sciences cluster. The utility plans to expand the One Zone footprint across the city in the coming years.
Toronto Hydro Telecom offered city dwellers free access to One Zone for the first six months of service. In April, the utility started charging for access with three pricing options: $4.99 for one hour, $9.99 for a 24-hour window or $29 per month (plus taxes).
Despite a number of access options already available in the city’s core, Toronto Hydro Telecom was convinced it could attract customers. If asked to boil down its business plan for Wi- Fi, the utility might answer, “If we build it, they will come.” So, have they come? And now that access comes at a price, are they staying? Does this network really have the potential to contribute to the vibrancy of the city to the same extent as Jane Jacobs’ sidewalks?
Ahead of projections
Toronto Hydro Telecom president Dave Dobbin said things are going better than they hoped. “During the free period we gave out more than 43,000 passwords,” he said, adding that during this time up to 1,200 users were accessing the One Zone network at any given time.
Dobbin stressed that paid service has only been offered for a couple of months, but pointed out “when we wrote our business plan we had estimated getting a 10 per cent conversion ratio from free to paid subscribers, and we’re tracking well ahead of that.” He is especially pleased that about 30 per cent of those using the paid service have bought monthly subscriptions, far more than projected. Another 30 per cent have opted for day passes, while 40 per cent are paying by the hour. “We thought there would be a lot more daily subscribers. We thought they would be 80 per cent,” Dobbin said, with the remaining 20 per cent evenly split between monthly and hourly users. “Considering we’re getting such a high percentage of monthly subscribers, the interesting thing from a financial model is if those monthly subscribers become repeat subscribers.”
Dobbin is equally pleased by the geographic breakdown of these users. “About half of the monthly subscribers coming on are condo dwellers,” Dobbin said. The measure is based on the street addresses provided when people register. “We were really surprised,” he said, because none of the One Zone marketing has targetted specific groups. That should change now that the network has gone through its initial shakedown period. “We have to focus our efforts more on condo dwellers.”
Dobbin said the balance of the monthly users appear to be business addresses. He speculates that sales personnel and others who spend much of their day on the go are taking advantage of the network.
Fuelling economic development
Joaquin Alvarado is not surprised One Zone is being well received. The director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University has been watching the Toronto Wi-Fi project closely. “There’s a good reason why so much of the global community is starting to think about and move on these kinds of wireless networks in regions,” he said, noting that they help cities “to enable the innovation and connectivity that people are already blending between their personal, private and business lives.”
This is important, Alvarado said, because “more efficient business practices and richer, more diverse cultural experiences—the kinds of things that leading cities and leading regions are promoting as part of their economic development—are underpinned by networking issues.”
Kevin Restivo agrees. The analyst with The SeaBoard Group in Toronto said municipal Wi-Fi networks are filling a void in the market. “Access to information is increasingly viewed as a utility, much like water or electricity,” he said. “Any city interested in retaining and attracting knowledge workers should have that kind of access to information afforded to its citizens on an affordable basis.”
He thinks One Zone is a natural choice for those living in the coverage area. “If people have the tools and live downtown, why wouldn’t they want that always-on Internet access?” he asked. “If I’m a condo dweller, I’d definitely like to be able to go to a nearby coffee shop or bar and have the same kind of access I have at home.”
Innovation driver
As president of the Ottawa-based Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATAAlliance), John Reid is keen to have cities across the country embrace Wi-Fi. “Municipalities are actually seeing this as a major attractor for local business development and the many local communities initiating these networks will probably lead to many more that want to keep pace,” he said. “I think this is a healthy sign.
“We should do within our own jurisdictions anything we can do to boost the number of paths to attract product mandates and talent,” Reid said, and municipal Wi-Fi networks are one way of doing that.
Moreover, Reid expects these networks will help create opportunities for Canadian companies to develop innovative wireless applications. “We definitely see a significant amount of innovation in companies that are developing services and solutions that will actually sit on these more accessible networks,” he said. “The research we’ve done here looks at a whole spectrum of companies—whether they’re doing traffic reporting or marketing for restaurants—and we’ve found that [Wi-Fi] is a much more viable platform.”
The catch, Alvarado said, is that hundreds of cities around the world are also building these networks. “This is a time-based race more than anything else. There are a lot of great cities on Earth and it’s really easy to get all over the place now. Wireless Internet is the kind of convenience that is appropriate in a global economy. It makes it easy to be in your city.”
That appears to be what’s driving One Zone’s hourly and daily subscribers. “They’re people from out of the territory—and they’re coming from all over the world,” Dobbin said. “They’re staying in a hotel and they want to be connected.”
More to do
But some remain cautious. Dave Forde is head of Profectio and the chair of Toronto Tech Week, an annual event organized in partnership with the city’s economic development department to showcase the tech community. Toronto Tech Week attracted about 2,000 people to conferences and networking events in May, but Forde said he’s not yet ready to promote One Zone as a way for delegates to stay connected next year.
“It’s a great idea, but the network is still new,” he said. “I don’t know where the network works reliably today and the last thing I want to do is promise my attendees that they can get access to Wi-Fi and then have it not work.”
In addition, Forde anticipates that some maturity is needed in the Wi-Fi market to ensure visitors to the city aren’t penalized because providers are busy fighting turf wars. As an example, he noted some convention centres offer their own Wi-Fi services—at a price premium—and that public networks such as One Zone and localized wireless access points operated by Canada’s telecom companies can’t penetrate these facilities.
Alvarado believes pressure from other Wi-Fi cities will force providers to set aside their differences and work together for the good of local communities. “Citizens are going to both expect and demand it. If I’m stopping at the library or the café or the city hall town meeting or the lobby in front of my place of business or my public school, I’m going to need some wireless connectivity,” he said. “Eventually we’ll get past the phase of knocking our heads against the wall and wondering how we’re going to do this.”
Jacobs would no doubt agree. As she concluded in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “Vital cities have marvellous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties.” And that applies whether one is speaking of the benefits of vibrant sidewalks or of the vibrant wireless networks now being laid overtop of them.
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