Opinion: Blanketing LA with wireless promises

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‘Today is the start of Los Angeles version 2.0,’ Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared this afternoon at sun-drenched 7+FIG, a downtown shopping and dining plaza. The occasion was the launch of the LA WiFi Initiative, which aims to provide cut-rate wireless Internet access throughout the city. But like so many announcements about high-tech products and services, this one was mostly vapor. There are no plans, no permits, no vendors, no dollars, no business model, no partners -- just the mayor’s stated intention to have the network completed by 2009.

The idea of a municipal wireless network has been kicking around City Hall for several years, and so far the only tangible results are pilot projects at libraries and a handful of other sites. Last summer the city’s Information Technology Agency started work on a request for proposals for a citywide network, promising to have one ready by fall. That RFP never went out, and now Villaraigosa is putting together a new group of city officials, corporate executives and community representatives to hammer out critical features of the project and sign up a builder.

Although most of the details remain to be worked out, a few key principles are clear. The top priority appears to be extending high-speed Internet access to users who can’t afford it today, largely for the sake of improving education. Rather than simply subsidize Internet accounts and computers for the poor, the city wants to entice the private sector to build a network that can provide basic service for free and more advanced services (higher speeds, for example, or fewer advertisements) for a fee. The ballpark cost is close to $60 million, so whoever builds the network is going to want to recoup at least some of those costs by selling services to city departments. That dovetails with a second priority listed by Villaraigosa: using ubiquitous Internet access to improve city services. Automatic meter reading, anyone?

The timetable set by Villaraigosa -- contract by year’s end, construction starting in mid-2008 and finishing in 2009 -- seems far too optimistic for what promises to be one of the largest municipal wireless networks in the world. The public-private partnership that Villaraigosa favors is patterned after what Philadelphia, Portland and San Francisco are doing, but those cities’ networks are still under construction and their business models remain unproven. Meanwhile, competition for broadband customers is slowly intensifying, with Sprint Nextel about to launch its high-speed wireless service and more spectrum due to be auctioned soon. On the other hand, AT&T, Verizon and other giant telecommunications companies have shifted from fighting municipal initiatives to bidding on them. Those companies are the ones who stand to lose the most from such ventures, which threaten to steal customers and depress prices for broadband connections. They may be on board now as a defensive measure, but their shift makes it a lot easier to get these projects off the ground.