VIEW ORIGINAL ARTICLE

New Orleans officials hope a new municipally owned wireless network will help lure businesses and residents back to the hurricane-ravaged city.

While parts of the Big Easy remain without services as basic as water or power, officials have unveiled the first phase of what could become a citywide Wi-Fi network.

Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast in late August, causing massive destruction to both property and infrastructure--knocking out millions of phone, cable and other communications lines and facilities--many of which still have not been brought back online.

Now, as one of the rare rebuilds of an entire metropolitan area from the ground up, New Orleans is becoming a prime testing ground for new ideas and new technologies.

One of the earliest and broadest such efforts involves Wi-Fi technology that will combine a citywide video surveillance network and a public Internet service.

With this service, anyone using Wi-Fi devices, ranging from computers to palmtop organizers, can now access the Internet for free in New Orleans' French Quarter and central business district. Though some regulatory and strategic uncertainty lies ahead, officials say they hope to expand the network to saturate the city limits within a year, focusing especially on low-income areas that were particularly hard-hit when the levees burst and where phone service has still not resumed.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, criticized by some for his government's sluggish response following Katrina, says he sees the network as integral to the city's repopulation.

"With a single step, city departments, businesses and private citizens can access a tool that will help speed the rebuilding of New Orleans as a better, safer and stronger city," Nagin said.

Greg Meffert, the city’s chief information officer and executive assistant to the mayor, has compared New Orleans' technological rebuilding with a colossal corporate startup.

"There's a bit of a 'Sim City' element to this place now," Meffert said, referring to the popular 1990s city planning computer game. "New Orleans is becoming the ultimate testing ground to prove that these 'out-there' concepts can work."

Meffert's entrepreneurial background in the private sector includes founding and managing several tech firms.

The New Orleans network uses an infrastructure known as a wireless "mesh." More than 100 access points currently make up the system, developed by Silicon Valley-based Tropos Networks. The shoe box-sized devices, mostly mounted on street lamps, seamlessly push data through the air using 2.4 gigahertz radio waves. The mesh structure links wirelessly to its fiber optic backbone using Motorola's Canopy technology instead of wires.

Tropos donated 50 wireless units to deploy the network after the hurricane, and Intel bought another 50 units for donation. Tropos says between 20 and 25 units are required to serve each square mile of coverage. Pronto Networks, whose portal software helps control access to the network, also donated services.

New Orleans joins Philadelphia and other large American cities that have either launched or are planning wide-scale municipal wireless networks. What makes New Orleans' network distinct, however, is its unique metamorphosis.

Before Katrina, New Orleans had installed Tropos wireless access points in several neighborhoods to support video surveillance cameras for local law enforcement, hoping to lower the city’s violent-crime rate.

Following the hurricane, the city’s depleted infrastructure furthered its widely documented communication breakdown. But once the surveillance network's wireless units were reestablished, city workers could use the Internet when even cell phone service was unavailable.

"The wireless network allowed us to be much more automated after Katrina," Meffert said, noting that his staff has shrank by more than 1,000 people since the hurricane. "With the network in place, our staff electronically filed 110,000 inspection reports of flood-damaged homes in four weeks."

Meffert says an important caveat to the network is its dual-use functionality for both government and public Internet access. City workers have access to a separate, secure network--using the same infrastructure--to expedite field work, from police reports to damage assessments.

New Orleans' launch stirs the debate surrounding city governments that compete with commercial service providers by offering free or inexpensive Internet access. These providers, primarily telecommunications and cable companies, have successfully lobbied many states to limit the maximum speed available on municipal networks.

Louisiana is one of those states, so municipal networks may not offer transfer rates faster than 144 kilobits per second (kbps)--roughly three times the speed of dial-up access. But because New Orleans is in a state of emergency, Meffert explains, it can temporarily disregard that ordinance.

Today, the network runs at 512 kbps, enough to support Internet usage beyond e-mail and Web surfing, including voice communication services, which Meffert says could be invaluable if disaster strikes New Orleans again.

Meffert says the city hopes to overturn the legislation and maintain the network's faster speed for the long run, despite the looming threat of legal action against the city.

"After a hurricane, a tornado, a flood and being homeless for three months, getting a subpoena doesn’t scare me a lot," Meffert said. "It’s my job to rebuild this city and we need this network--any wrinkled feathers that come out of this can’t be my concern."

Logistix : Consulting , Metro-Scale Wireless Broadband , Municipal Online Services , and Disaster Recovery

© 2007 Logistix --- Contact --- Terms of Use --- Site Map