Athens Inspires Public WiFi

By Marc Schultz, Personal Democracy Forum. Posted October 27, 2005.

Built up around the land grant university chartered there in 1785, Athens, Ga. is a college town, pure and simple. If it's known nationally, it's for being home to neo-hippie pop bands REM and the B-52s. But on an April morning in 2002, the University of Georgia quietly started a telecommunications revolution, introducing the nation to the idea of municipally-sponsored wireless technology -- WiFi, a technology that prognosticators, major media, and ambitious politicians world-wide are hailing as the Next Big Thing in the evolution of the Internet.

Why is WiFi so hot for so many different constituencies? Ask the folks in Athens. "Information used to be a destination," says Dr. Scott Shamp, director of the University of Georgia's New Media Institute (NMI), which led the town's WiFi project. "The weird thing about wireless is that it shifts that relationship: information is not a destination anymore. It's a companion."

Cities across the country, including Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston, are currently exploring their wireless connectivity options. The most promising of the initiatives, Philadelphia Wireless, is using the same technology developed in Athens and licensed from the University of Georgia. At the NMI they call it "The Cloud."

The NMI, itself established in April 2000,was the University of Georgia's attempt to help people understand what to do with the powerful new medium called the Internet. Set up as a traditional teaching and research unit, the department changed direction in April of 2001, following a research retreat in which 30 "cool people" from around Athens -- artists, business leaders, government officials, university faculty and staff -- spent two days answering the question, "What technologies are going to have the biggest impact in the next three to four years?" Their answer: Wireless Internet connectivity -- or what the NMI dubs "mobile media."

A creative approach

Initially, Shamp says, the NMI's approach to wireless was going to be "the standard academic way - we were going to do studies and we were going to do questionnaires, we were going to do interviews. It was the way that professors always approach things.

"But we had a group of students come in -- music students, a romance language student, a computer science student -- and they said, 'If you're going to talk the talk of wireless you ought to walk the walk,'" Shamp says. "They said for very little money, we can make a wireless cloud over downtown Athens. I said, 'How much money?' They said 500 bucks. I said, 'Done.'"

In a few short weeks, the first wireless Internet transmitter box was hung on a telephone pole at the corner of Clayton and College Streets, invisibly connecting anyone drinking coffee in a nearby café or lounging on a sidewalk bench -- with a computer and wireless network card -- to the Internet.

"The technology really is fairly easy to understand," says Shamp, who happily admits he didn't know how any of the stuff he was buying actually worked at the time. "The students cobbled together a couple of Linksys [wireless router] access points for 150 bucks, we got a weatherproof box, we bought some antennas, hung it on a pole in downtown Athens."

As often happens when you make history -- particularly if an international news network is in your backyard -- the national media quickly took notice. CNN's technology program, Next@CNN, first reported on the Athens project at the end of July, at a time when The Cloud, initially dubbed the WAGZone (for Wireless Athens Georgia Zone) covered just three blocks. CNN repeated the story for weeks. The little town of Athens had become an international phenomenon.

And the city paid attention to its newfound celebrity.

"We always try to develop close relationships to the University," says Jeff Montgomery, a spokesman for Athens-Clarke County government. "The NMI has worked really well reaching out to the community, and we saw it as an opportunity to tap into innovation. And since it's free for the public, it branches out into some quality-of-life issues. It's a neat thing for Athens to develop and be known for."

Shortly after the media coverage appeared, representatives of Athens-Clarke County's Computer Information Services Department visited the NMI, paving the way for the second access box to be installed, in April 2002, using county resources. A few months later, the ACC Board of Commissioners agreed to endorse and help operate the WAGZone for a year.

BellSouth, which provides phone and dial-up Internet service in Athens, has had a mutually supportive relationship with the NMI since 2000. "We were actually one of the first corporations to give a gift to NMI," says BellSouth spokeswoman LeAnn Boucher. "We gave them about $6,000 back in 2000 to help get them funded."

Marc Schultz is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

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