Connect, Enable, Transform … Getting Wireless Right

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Connect, Enable, Transform … Getting Wireless Right

9/3/2003

By Terry Calhoun

In the past few months, I’ve been various places where I would have liked to have been online. (Well, actually, there is no place I wouldn’t like to be online.) Often, these are places where I can detect that I am surrounded by a wireless network – just not one that I am permitted to use. For example, when in the University of Michigan Business School, I can perceive the wireless network, but since I am staff in the School of Education, I don’t have access. Unless, during limited business hours, I fill out forms, authenticate myself, and check out a special PCMIA card.

Yet, last week as I was refueling my SUV at a local gas station I noticed a little Wi-Fi decal on the door. I checked and, sure enough, I was able to pop onto the hot spot with my notebook – for free, and without creating any identity-sucking account – and download my email while I was pumping gas.

This can be very confusing and frustrating. When I am in a high-tech building on a college campus, there is no connectivity for me. Yet when I am in a gas station at the end of the dirt road I live on, I can get on line?

Wouldn’t you think that universities and colleges would have more at stake, in terms of being identified with and providing Internet access, than gas stations? We do. And we think that the model that Case Western Reserve University is implementing right now is the one to follow.

Case went "live" this week. Spread throughout the Case campus and the University Circle area are 1,230 Cisco wireless access points. Students, faculty, and staff can log in with security – or they and visitors of all kinds, including staff, faculty, and students from elsewhere, can log into a "guest" domain and go browsing the Internet.

If this was a year from now and I was anywhere in Cleveland, I might be able to access a no-charge, completely public wireless network, a courtesy that should extend throughout the entire metropolitan region. That’s Case’s vision for what is being called "OneCleveland," and it’s making that vision real. We think Case is getting it right and that all campuses should follow suit, right away.

We recently talked to Lev Gonick, Case’s CIO, and asked him about the technology issues and the security issues: "What about security? What about file sharing and bandwidth?" we asked. And he responded: "Those were discussions for four years ago." Lev ech'es our own frequent refrain that, "the technology is the easy part." He suggests that looking at such a wonderful community resource from the traditional IT staff perspective is looking at it from the wrong end. Where else but on or near a college campus would you expect to find your connection to information – that’s the place to begin looking from!

Nothing is really free, of course, and so there are many other models. One is the Starbucks model, where customers are charged $6 per hour for access. But in just trying to cover its costs, Starbucks is spending more money: its billing system and related customer support may be the most expensive part of the system. And Starbucks is averaging less than two paying Internet-using customers per day, per store.

At least the smart folks at Starbucks realized early on that being a hot spot would draw customers in. They just got all tied up in knots about the cost and payment model. There are other models. Schlotzky’s Deli actually encourages its store managers to beam Wi-Fi into college dormitories. (Users have to register, which has its obvious pluses and minuses.) Quoted in a recent Wired article, one California restaurant owner puts in a way we think will be true in every restaurant in less than 10 years: "Charging for online usage would be like charging for salt and pepper."