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WiFi Q&A

Chris Puccio

Chris Puccio is director of information technology for the city of Boulder, Colorado. He is also a lead player in an ambitious regional effort to bring WiFi to 10 (or more) cities in the Metro Denver area. It's called the Colorado Wireless Communities, and depending upon how it unfolds, it may prove to be a model for how to roll out wireless networks on a regional scale.

How did Colorado Wireless Communities get started?

It started with a few key cities in Colorado that were looking into municipal wireless: Boulder, Arvada, Thornton, Lakewood and Bloomfield were the five founding cities.

And where within the cities did the energy for this come from?

It came from the technology people. At least in Boulder, it was my push to make it something for the city council to address. They'd heard of Philadelphia, they'd heard about San Francisco, thinking back a year ago in this industry. It was an easy sell.

Each of the five founding cities brought Civitium [a consultant] on board to help with a feasibility study. Each of us reached out to our communities to see if they thought it was a good idea to do this, and the response was a resounding yes. The theory was, if the five reports had a lot of common aims, then does it make sense to do this regionally? They did. So we published a regional feasibility study in December. All these documents are on our website, coloradowirelesscommunities.com.

Puccio

That's when we got serious about a regional effort. We had five cities, so we looked strategically at whom it made sense to invite, looking within the Metro Denver area. We reached out to eight cities and five said yes. That's how we got to be ten cities.

Is Denver one of them?

Our focus was ten cities that are relatively small, could get together, and make it a doable project. We consciously did not pursue Denver. They're ten times the size of any one us and have different technology and strategy requirements, which is appropriate. Instead, we chose to periodically meet with Denver to keep them in the loop on our progress, and this is working well. I can see them becoming part of a future expansion of the wireless network, in conjunction with our selected service provider.

What sets us apart is we're 10 cities. We have a memorandum of understanding in place that allowed us to go to bid together. We're working aggressively now on an intergovernmental agreement among the ten of us. The goal is to form the Colorado Wireless Communities as a single entity that's legally binding so we can have one contract with a service provider instead of ten contracts.

Ideally we get proposals in March. [Note: this deadline was later extended to April 13.] In April, May, June we evaluate proposals and start coming up with a short list. Ideally by the end of the year we have a contract in place and it's a real project at that point.

For all the hype around municipal wireless over the past two years, it's surprising how few of these systems are actually operable. Why do you think that is?

Look back two years ago — there really was no industry. WiFi has been around a while — we're all doing it indoors or with hotspots. But as far as blanketing the city, two years ago it was just a concept and Philadelphia was leading the charge. That's where the public-private partnership model evolved, in Philly. Once that model evolved and Earthlink offered that to Philly that's when I got interested. Because I know I did not have $2 to $4 million in city funds lying around to go out and fund a network.

So once the private sector saw enough of an opportunity where they were willing to invest the capital in the infrastructure, that's when I got serious about it. Myself and a couple hundred of my peers of across the country. That's when we saw the explosion.

Where it will evolve five years from now, I don't know. Ideally it's going to be a successful viable market that's profitable and moving forward. But there's not a lot of real world experience showing that, yes these business models work. So the industry is still on a steep learning curve right now.

What are you looking at in terms of applications?

Everybody's focused on the infrastructure right now, but it's just that — an infrastructure. The key is the applications and services running on it.

Public safety wireless networks today are limited in speed. So there's only so much you can do with that bandwidth in the car, or on that portable laptop for public safety. It's very good for records management, putting in tickets or incident reports. As far as evolving to higher-bandwidth applications such as video and photos, you can't do it today. Even with 100 kilobits per second in the car [about twice as fast as a dial-up modem] it's just not realistic.

And the officers — they're cops, not technology people. So their patience with technology is very limited. So you need to deploy a very good, reliable, robust application for them. If I tried to give them photos or video today it will be a matter of minutes before they'd be calling up me and complaining. It's just too slow. They don't have time to wait for it in the car. They have to do their jobs.

We have some hotspots now, so when police come close to a fire station or a public safety building, the laptop automatically connects. But as far as cops really leveraging high-speed mobile broadband, it's not viable. They have to go to a couple of spots in the city to get it. And then they're still sitting in a parking lot, so they can't be productive in their job as cops sitting in a parking lot.

So take that theory of a hotspot and now cover not only the city but also a whole region — the 10 cities we're talking about. It opens a host of potential for public safety. Firefighters can have blueprints of buildings they're about to walk into. For cops, video surveillance is a big deal, as is bringing up mug shots or photos of whoever they're looking for.

What else is out there beyond public safety?

We're out to bid on smart parking for a small area downtown. We'll take all the old coin-operated parking meters on every single parking space, and collapse those into parking kiosks. You plug in your parking space number, swipe a credit card and can pay for just today or buy a monthly pass — it gives you lots of flexibility.

Well you can start to leverage that infrastructure in interesting ways. When the University of Colorado has football games, the city offers free parking to the whole area around campus. How do you make sure people aren't paying for parking? It's word of mouth. However, what you can do with smart parking and a wireless infrastructure is make sure those pay stations aren't collecting for parking, and make that clear on a message. And you can do that remotely. You don't have to go around to all these pay stations.

You could also do demand-based parking. During the weekday when there are more vehicles you could charge more for parking and have that automatically happen. That would be a political decision to decide what we charge and how we charge it. But at least the infrastructure is in place to allow them to do whatever they want to do.

The parking technology we're shopping for today is cellular-based. But a key part of the RFP is the migration path from cell-based to a WiFi-based connection. That would then eliminate the monthly cellular charge we pay.

What else?

Automated meter reading. Our water utility has 30,000 accounts, and we now have a person driving a truck down each street reading those meters with a short-range wireless connection. With WiFi we've talked about having real-time water reads for residents. So you can log into your account and say, OK, how much water did I use today? How much water did I use in the last five minutes running that load of laundry? We're on water budgeting in Boulder, so conserving water is a big deal — you pay more the more water you use. So I can see a big demand for this once residents understand what they can use it for.

The momentum won't turn until the service is turned on and your average person is out there surfing the web, doing whatever they do. Then the light bulb will go off. We have a lot of creative people in Boulder, and once they see an infrastructure in place, I know for a fact that we'll have dozens and dozens of applications.

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