This just sort of fell out of my head this afternoon... my response to a lot of these municpal wireless projects has finally congealed in a somewhat coherent form.
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Ad-Supported Municipal Wireless Networks and the Future of Cities: Three Issues Missing From the Current Debate
Anthony Townsend
Research Director
Technology Horizons Program
Institute for the Future
Palo Alto, California
http://www.iftf.org
From Philadelphia to San Francisco to Portland, plans for municipal wireless networks are on the drawing board in hundreds of cities across America. These ambitious projects are driven by both push and pull forces. On the push side, Wi-Fi technology has rewritten the economics of deploying broadband access in densely built cities. What used to require tearing up streets and deploying costly cables now can be achieved my mounting antennas on street lamps every hundred yards or so. On the pull side, minority communities and small businesses that have been bypassed by DSL and digital cable buildout are mobilizing and demanding equal access to the vital economic lifeline that broadband networks represent.
While the speed with which local governments are moving to exploit this opportunity is admirable, IFTF’s research has identified several areas where insufficient energy is being devoted to explore the long-term consequences of design and implementation decisions. While the working life of today’s Wi-Fi technologies may only be five to ten years, the infrastructure and governance models put in place today are likely to shape a whole generation’s worth of urban wireless networks. If cities fail to think ahead, they may find it more challenging to leverage wireless infrastructure for digital inclusion, economic development and public safety in the future.
There are three key areas that deserve special attention:
• Guaranteeing citizens’ role as content providers
• Finding a balance for location privacy
• Enabling the Internet of Things
Guaranteeing Citizens’ Role as Content Providers
Perhaps the most exciting development on the Internet in the last five years has been the rise of open, lightweight toolkits for the collaborative creation of local knowledge. San Francisco-based Craigslist.org for example, has become one of the main repositories for classified advertising, and an engine for local economic and social development by making it easier for people to trade and organize locally. Wikipedia has enabled a global community to develop an authoritiatve, multi-lingual compendium of knowledge.
Discussions about the design of today’s municipal wireless networking efforts have not yet addressed the way community-created content can be solicited and integrated in the splash pages and portal sites where wireless users are greeted when they connect. We do know that cities such as Long Beach, California and business improvement districts in New York City have experimented with local content. However, these past experiments did not leverage the tools we possess today to rethink how we might provide a community bulletin board as an integral part of the municipal wireless experience. The directions of current municipal projects instead are unwittingly viewing the wireless network as a means to escape local communities, and as a one-way street for advertisers to subsidize the network’s operating costs.
Therefore, in order to guarantee that municipal wireless networks willl enhance citizen’s roles as content providers, cities should:
• Require that wireless franchisees provide significant community access to wireless captive portal pages and splash pages. Ownership, control and access to this resource can be organized in any number of ways – having local students document and chronicle local events and other open content authoring models.
• Cities should demand access to any future advertising channel deployed on ad-supported municipal networks for public service announcement-type content.
Striking A Balance on Location Privacy
A deadlock is looming over the issue of location privacy on municipal wireless networks. On the one hand, ISPs and advertisers argue that only constant monitoring of user location will allow them to effectively understand and target ads to justify the costs of building and operating citywide networks. On the other hand, privacy advocates argue essentially that any tracking of user location that is not necessary for the operation of data communications service is an unnecessary invasion of individual privacy.
However, reality, as always is less clear. While cultural differences abound, wireless users around the world have shown a willingness to have their locations tracked for various purposes – security, navigation, and social networking. However, companies and governments have also consistently underestimated people’s ability to make informed decisions about the disclosure of personal information. And it is increasingly clear that location-targeted advertising may be the best single business model for rapid, comprehensive deployment of wireless broadband in American cities.
What is needed then is a solution that balances users’ desires for location-based services that content providers and advertisers seek to deliver, but also allows users to safeguard their personal location information. One technical solution to this dilemma comes from Intel Research Seattle, whose PlaceLab software allows a Wi-Fi laptop or cellular smart phone to accurately determine its position without any outside help, and then let the user chose when and where to share this information with 3rd party content providers. Such privacy-observant location technologies should be on the top of any city’s demand for wireless franchisees seeking to deploy user-tracking technologies.
Therefore, in order to guarantee a balanced approach to user location privacy, cities should:
• Favor proposals that put the power of location determination and sharing of location data in the user’s hands
• Emphasize the need for special precautions to protect location data for vulnerable populations such as teenagers
• Provide a mechanism for receiving and investigating claims of abuse and excessive invasions of privacy
Enabling the Internet of Things
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, cities need to start thinking beyond contemporary visions of wireless usage – which is essentially limited to people going online from Wi-Fi equipped laptops and PDAs – and embrace more future-oriented visions of a world of connected things.
For the next five years or so, most of the devices that we will connect to municipal networks will be interactive terminals – laptops, desktops, PDAs and smart phones. What these devices all have in common is a screen, that can display a web browser, onto which the value-producing location-based ads can be shown.
However, as we move out beyond five years, increasingly the value of universal wireless converage will start to come from the browser-less objects that can benefit from being connected to the Internet. Yury Gitman’s MagicBike has shown the potential of what USC professor Julian Bleecker calls “blogjects” or objects that blog, and record data about themselves to the Internet.
We don’t know quite yet what these Internet-connected objects will really be useful for, but that’s sort of the point. The cities that create an enviroment that is friendly to experimentation with these new technologies and the ways of urban living they will enable, will become a natural incubator for an entire new generation of technology companies. The Internet of Things is going to be invented in cities – which possess the most complex ecosystems of things, people and places - but the question of which cities is still a very much open matter.
The problem arises however, in that most of the proposals being put forth today for ad-support municipal networks require a browser-based login. This is where the user is identified and authenticated for tracking. While this is a necessary function (with due attentions to the concerns voiced above), it precludes the possibility of widespread access to the Internet for networked objects without screens and browsers.
Therefore, in order to encourage the Internet of Things and the economic development opportunities it presents, cities should:
• Require franchisees to devote some minimal network resources to networked objects for experimental purposes. The bandwidth requirements would not be excessive, but constant connectivity without complex connection obstacles are needed to encourage bottom-up innovation.
• Separate the issue of VoIP handsets from the Internet of things. In the short-term, Voice over IP handsets will be the main form of browser-less device accessing municipal networks. However, VoIP telephony needs to be treated separately from access for networked objects, which are an experimental use not a commercial one.
Interesting article, and very informative. I am new to your blog and I like what I see. I look forward to your future work. Thanks.
Posted by: CellphoneSavant | April 18, 2006 at 08:45 AM
Just a question regarding advertising on municipal wireless networks. 121 media have developed an application called pagesense for which they have signed up 10 customers across the US. It works by analysing a users browsing habits and then directing adverts upto 3 or 4 times a day as a person is switching between websites. Do you know any of the networks involved and whether or not their are issues regarding privacy. 121's background is a little controversial considering it used to be spyware
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