Imagine a Midwestern industrial town where a rookie
mayor proposes a property-tax increase, the first in almost 10 years. About $6 million of the money would build a citywide
wireless-Internet system. Imagine the protests from angry property owners
who would pay nearly $100 a year more for a $250,000 home. Imagine the
outcry from business interests. Imagine the political potshots at
city-council meetings. We’re talking hard-earned tax dollars spent so
that teenagers can surf MySpace while their parents shop eBay. They’d be riding this new mayor out on a rail,
right? Wrong. Aurora — the second-largest city in Illinois,
home to the fictional cable-access show Wayne’s
World and one of the first cities in
America to light its streets with electricity — is quite a place. When the mayor proposed the tax increase in his 2006
budget, the board of Aurora’s chamber of commerce unanimously
endorsed the spending plan. The budget sailed through the City Council on
an 11-1 vote. In the end, this city near Chicago will be spending millions
of dollars less than the mayor proposed. Seeing that the city was serious, MetroFi, based in
California, agreed to build a system for free. The city will get access in
return for allowing the company to set up a system that relies on
advertisers to pay costs and return a profit. Neither taxpayers nor computer users will pay a penny
for unlimited access to the Internet. Instead, a strip of ad space about an
inch wide will run along the tops of browser windows. No ads will appear on
city computers, nor will ads run for computer users who pay a $20 monthly
fee, considerably less than what for-profit companies charge for DSL or
cable access that must be bundled with telephone or cable-television
service — America Online charges more than $20 for stand-alone
dial-up service. If another company comes along with a better idea, fine:
The city’s agreement with MetroFi is nonexclusive, so competitors are
free to take their best shots. The system is scheduled to start up within two months,
with the entire city going online by early next year. Community leaders
plan to collect computers from government agencies and businesses and
distribute them to low-income families so that poor schoolchildren can have
the same digital advantage as their classmates. By all accounts, it’s a wonderful thing. Nary a
peep has been heard from telecom and cable companies that charge for
Internet service. “It’s not costing taxpayers a dime,”
says Gerry Galloway, a consultant for SkyPilot, which is providing hardware
for the endeavor. “The Internet service itself will be free to the
public.” Slumlords might have cause to worry, however, because
building inspectors and other field-based city workers will use laptops or
PDAs instead of going to city offices to retrieve and submit paperwork.
“This is going to make existing personnel a lot more
productive,” Galloway says. Yes, Aurora is basking in attention as it prepares to
become the first city in Illinois to offer free high-speed Internet to
anyone inside the city limits. Tony Hylton, a consultant to the city who
shepherded the deal with MetroFi, says he’s fielded calls from scores
of cities, including faraway ones like Boston and San Antonio, that want
advice. But Hylton hasn’t heard from anyone in Springfield, which is
fast falling behind as cities around the nation make access to the Internet
a fundamental right, regardless of income or the whims of private
corporations. Hylton says he’d be happy to help Springfield
establish a toll-free digital highway. “You feel free to give them my
name and phone number,” he says. Galloway says the same thing. “I think we can
help them a lot,” he says. “SkyPilot is very interested in
Springfield. I’m trying to set up a meeting with the people in
Springfield.”
The question, though, is whether the city is truly
interested in the democratization of the Internet or is just paying lip
service.
After more than a year of talk, a project by Downtown
Springfield Inc. to establish a high-speed hotspot in downtown Springfield
remains in the embryonic stage. Meanwhile, an ad hoc committee has been
quietly meeting to figure out how to bring affordable high-speed Internet
to the entire city. The two groups are independent of each other, and no
one is coordinating efforts. The lieutenant governor’s office has money
available for the downtown project, but Springfield hasn’t gotten far
enough to know how much to ask for or exactly how it would be spent. No one
knows the service boundaries, nor is there a timeline to get a system up
and running. “We are not even at a point where we can say what
it’s going to cost,” says Carolyn Brown Hodge, director of
rural affairs for Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who is pushing hard for high-speed
Internet access throughout the state. Hanson Information Systems is engineering the system,
and Cisco Systems has agreed to donate transmitters that will spread
signals. The city still hasn’t given permission for transmitters to
be installed on city-owned utility poles. “I think the big thing is going through the
bureaucracy, getting everyone to sign off on the antennas — we need
some sort of agreement to get the antennas on the poles,” says Al
Gietl, director of sales and marketing for Hanson Information Systems. So far as the city is concerned, everything is
preliminary. “We’ve attended meetings as observers to
listen with everyone else,” says Ray Serati, spokesman for city-owned
City Water, Light & Power. The city is content to let other entities
make things happen. “We are watching what Downtown Springfield is
doing on this to see how they want to structure this,” says Ernie
Slottag, spokesman for Mayor Tim Davlin, who dropped a proposal to build a
$96 million system with fiber optics when he took office in 2003. A city
study released the previous year showed that the system would pay for
itself within six years. Slottag asks who will pay to maintain a
high-speed-Internet system and who will pay to install it. Those questions
have already been answered in other cities. In Aurora, for example, private
enterprise is paying installation and maintenance costs. Slottag cautions
that what works for Aurora might not work here. For one thing, Springfield
is nearly twice the geographic size of Aurora, so more transmitting
equipment might be required, he notes. The downtown project is further along than the
citywide effort, which began about two months ago, with the ad hoc
committee holding just three meetings so far. The committee organized by
Alderman Frank Edwards is so new it doesn’t have a name yet.
Chairwoman Wendy Howerter, who heads the business and information
technology department at Lincoln Land Community College, says membership on
the committee is still being decided, but will hopefully include
representatives from the business community and local educational
institutions. If and when a downtown hotspot is established, it will
be a far cry from what other cities are doing. For one thing, access will be free for tourists, but
not for folks who live here, even though the plan calls for tax dollars to
be spent. After a week or so of service, users will be cut off and
won’t be allowed back without paying for a subscription. Who will
pocket money from subscribers and run the system hasn’t been decided.
In addition, the system will be engineered so that guests in downtown
hotels won’t be able to get free access. Instead, they’ll have
charges tacked onto their room bills for the privilege of checking e-mails
and otherwise using the Web. Planners say they don’t want to upset companies
that now profit from providing Internet service. “We’re just trying to stay away from
controversy in terms of trying to compete with other providers in town
— we’re not out here to compete with Insight,” Gietl
says. “It’s really for visitors and tourists.”
It’s a stance the mayor agrees with. When Edwards first suggested a public Internet-access
system at a March City Council meeting, Davlin had nothing but criticism,
saying that telephone and cable companies would object. He also blasted
Edwards’ proposal to increase the tax on telephone service to pay for
a system. My 82-year-old mother doesn’t surf the Internet, and
providing Internet service isn’t a priority for the city, said
Davlin, who has accepted at least $3,000 in campaign contributions from
Insight Midwest Holdings, a subsidiary of Insight Communications, which
bundles high-speed Internet access with cable service. The Illinois Hotel
Motel Political Action Committee has given the mayor $1,400, and the
Springfield Hotel Association has contributed $500. The mayor’s office doesn’t sound nearly so
strident today. “He was not against Wi-Fi; he was against taxes to
pay for it,” says Slottag, who attended the most recent meeting of
the ad hoc committee. The city doesn’t have an official position on
whether free unlimited public access to the Internet is a good thing, but
Davlin’s administration remains leery of cutting into profits for
telecommunication companies. “Obviously we don’t want to put
legitimate businesses out of business,” Slottag says. In St. Cloud, Fla., which this spring started up free
high-speed access for the entire town, city officials and contractors who
set up the system take a different slant on economic questions. The city
calculates that residents and businesses in the town of about 10,000 people
have been paying $4 million a year for Internet access. Instead of going to
out-of-town telecom companies, that money will now be spent closer to home,
city officials predict. The service, which began three months ago, has
proven more popular than city officials expected. More than half the
households in the city are using the system, which was paid for with public
money and is being maintained by a contractor. Jonathan Baltuch, president
of the firm that designed the system, says public spending is more than
offset by savings to the city. For example, phone bills of more than
$100,000 a year will disappear now that the city has Wi-Fi, he says. Proponents of Springfield’s downtown hotspot
hope to get at least $20,000 from the state to help pay for it. Why
don’t they ask the private sector to submit proposals to provide
unlimited access for free? “Before we ever do that, I want the city to say
yes without any reservation that they are ready to go forward,” Hodge
says. “At this point, the city has not agreed to [free unlimited
access]. We’re trying not to take away business. Right now,
everybody’s cautious, as they should be.”
Edwards, who has been attending meetings of the ad hoc
committee, says that no one has informed the committee that the downtown
hotspot won’t be built for city residents. “We all need to be on the same page,” he
says. “Why give someone something for free who doesn’t live
here and people who live here and pay for it can’t have it? The
people we’re really denying access to are people who can’t
afford to have it.”
Springfield’s reluctance to make the Internet
free astounds advocates for universal Internet access, who say that
limiting access in the planned downtown hotspot goes against nationwide
trends. “This is incredibly atypical and perhaps
unique, this idea of spending time, energy and money to make the network
worse,” says Sascha Meinrath, a digital activist in Urbana.
“They’re going to have to engineer their antennas to create
dead spots. It’s ludicrous.”
Springfield isn’t entirely alone, however. In
Quincy, a Mississippi River town due west of Springfield, civic boosters
also plan to limit access to a wireless network to just an hour or so each
day. “We don’t want to take business away from local
providers,” says Karol Ehmen, executive director of the Historic
Quincy Business District, which is putting the project together. It has
taken much longer than she or the state imagined — 10 months after
the lieutenant governor’s office awarded a $20,000 grant, access is
limited to one park. When the grant was announced last summer, backers
talked about putting downtown Quincy online, with access extending to
boaters on the Mississippi River. “It’s been a difficult
project because it’s all so new,” Ehmen says. Meinrath says that the Internet is too important to
let money decide who will and who won’t be allowed in cyberspace.
“This is social justice to create equitable access to a fundamental
resource,” he says. “We wouldn’t dream of saying no one
except private corporations can open a school — but in
telecommunications, it’s OK to do that.”
In Urbana, Meinrath and other community activists have
demonstrated how little it takes to get a system up and running. Four years
ago, Meinrath and friends got a hotspot going for less than $1,000 and
formed the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network. “We built it
out of recycled computers,” he says. “Today, we have about a
square mile covered.” The system proliferates as homeowners install
rooftop antennas to spread the signal. “Almost anyone can put up a
wireless device,” Meinrath says. “There are technologies that
have the capability of providing huge amounts of bandwidth ridiculously
cheap.”
Such systems obviously pose a threat to cable and
telephone companies, which have responded by lobbying government. More than
a dozen states have passed laws prohibiting municipalities from
establishing their own Internet-access systems that would compete with
private enterprise. Illinois isn’t one of them. When state Sen.
Steven Rauschenberger, R-Elgin, proposed such a bill last year, it got
nowhere in the Legislature. The battle to keep high-speed Internet
profitable for big business has shifted to Congress, which is considering
proposals that would allow telecom companies to decide which entities
should be allowed to use fiber-optic lines and other hardware that enables
lightning-fast speeds on the Internet. The lieutenant governor’s staffers are well
aware of what they’re up against in spreading broadband access across
the state. Near the end of the last legislative session, Quinn’s
staff paid a quiet visit to Sen. Deanna Demuzio, D-Carlinville. Would the
senator push for a $1 million pilot project aimed at making high-speed
wireless Internet available throughout Montgomery and Macoupin counties? “I said, ‘Wow — sure,’ ”
Demuzio recalls. Right now, dial-up is the only option in many areas of the
two rural counties, where cornstalks far outnumber warm bodies.
“Certainly I think wireless is in the future,” the senator
says. “By bringing wireless here, it opens the world for
many.”
Under the lieutenant governor’s plan, 14
communication towers used by the Illinois State Police and the Illinois
Department of Transportation would be equipped with transmitting nodes that
would blanket the two counties with Wi-Fi signals. It would be a
public-private partnership, with all costs recouped through nominal fees
for high-speed access that now isn’t available at any price in many
parts of the two counties. Preliminary plans show the system would pay for
itself within five years. Quinn needed $1 million from the Legislature to
make it work in a limited area that would be expanded to cover both
counties if all went well. What about AT&T, Verizon, and other
telecommunications companies? “We did this under the radar because of
who you just asked about,” answers Hodge. “Everyone would have
been on us and mad.” Demuzio won’t say just how she kept things
quiet while getting the money into the state budget. “I kind of
worked it through the system; I worked it through the budget,” she
says. “This is Illinois. It worked, all right? I only had a couple of
days to get it through. Hopefully I have not made myself some
enemies.”
As a legislator, Demuzio is looking forward to the day
when she’ll have the same wireless access at the Capitol that is now
in the works in her district. “It would certainly make our life
easier,” she says, “and it’s coming to us in a few towns
close to you.”
This article appears in Jun 1-7, 2006.
