Boston To Implement City-Wide Wireless

Boston has unveiled plans to build a city-wide wireless Internet network to serve its 590,000 residents, but its plan is, in an important way, different than similar projects that have been proposed by cities including Cambridge and San Francisco.

Rather than hiring a third-party provider to administer the network, as other cities have done, Boston will find an existing non-profit organization—or endow a new one—to run the system.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino said at a press conference Monday that the city plans to raise $16 to $20 million to fund the network. The money will come from businesses, universities, and foundations, though he did not rule out a contribution from the city.

Users would be charged about $15 per month for a connection, compared to the approximately $35 they must pay today.

“What we’re trying to do is bring Internet access to as many people across the city as possible,” Menino said. “We believe this model could be the best way to bridge the so-called ‘Digital Divide.’”

“The student in Mattapan should have the same access to the knowledge available from the web as the student living on Beacon Hill,” he added.

While the non-profit organization that the city is seeking will own the network, it will not act as the Internet Service Provider (ISP). Instead, it will allow other ISPs—such as Comcast or SBC/Yahoo!—to use the network infrastructure.

“We’re not turning it over to someone else,” Menino said. “We’ll be able to control our destiny—one outside corporation shouldn’t have a monopoly.”

In contrast, Philadelphia has hired Earthlink to build its network, and San Francisco hired Earthlink and Google.

Under Boston’s plan, the city will build 2,250 “mesh access points” to blanket the 49-square-mile city with wireless Internet. Boston has access to 467 city buildings, 9,000 light poles, 824 signal lights, and 1,735 fire department call boxes on which to mount the points.

No timetable has been set for the project. There are currently no major municipal wireless projects completed in the U.S.

The formal announcement of the municipal wireless project comes after Boston’s Wireless Task Force, which was formed on Feb. 8 to study the creation of a city-wide network, issued a report advocating a non-profit approach.

Six days before the Boston task force convened in February, Cambridge announced that it had been working for a year with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to provide wireless connections free-of-charge.

The Cambridge project, which is still in its planning stages, is the brainchild of Director of Information Technology Mary Hart and City Councilors Henrietta Davis and Michael A. Sullivan.

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.