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Hydro's wireless push
Very soon Toronto Hydro will switch on the first phase of its new wireless broadband service. Watch out, Mr. Rogers. Beware, Ma Bell
Jun. 26, 2006. 06:40 AM
TYLER HAMILTON
A bucket truck raises Toronto Hydro worker Joey Sanayhie to the top of a streetlight at the corner of Yonge St. and Adelaide St., and with him a beer keg-shaped device known fondly in industry circles as "The Bubba."
Several co-workers wearing hard hats look on, catching the attention of one passerby at the busy downtown intersection. "Is this one of those, `How many people does it take to change a lightbulb' kind of things?" she jokes, following up with a more serious zinger. "Hope this isn't costing taxpayers."
The "lightbulb" or "Bubba" in question is actually a wireless router, one of dozens that the telecom subsidiary of Toronto Hydro is installing throughout the downtown core and gradually across the city.
The company announced plans in March to create the largest Wi-Fi zone in Canada, making it possible for laptop-toting citizens, workers and tourists to access a high-speed link to the Internet virtually anywhere — bus stops, park benches, office towers, bar patios, indoor cafes and stores, you name it.
The utility's $60-million purchase last year of Toronto's streetlight system will be key to the deployment. The wireless equipment can be easily mounted near the top of each light pole, which offers the added bonus of electricity for powering the so-called mesh network.
It's an ambitious undertaking, similar to other projects in major cities across North America. Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Seattle are just a few of municipalities blanketing their public areas with invisible, ubiquitous broadband on-ramps. What mayor looking for re-election wouldn't embrace such an opportunity?
"The applications for Torontonians and our various city agencies, from libraries to public transportation and safety, to economic development, make this a historic moment in Toronto's development as a world-class city," Mayor David Miller boasted during the March announcement.
But the effort is already a few weeks behind schedule, demonstrating that the complexity of building a municipal Wi-Fi or "muniwifi" network stretches well beyond technology. The first phase of deployment around the city's financial district was supposed to be complete by the end of June. The goal here is to provide coverage northward from Front St. to Queen St. and westward from Church St. to Spadina Ave.
Sharyn Gravelle, vice-president of wireless at Toronto Hydro Telecom, says the June deadline will be missed and that Phase 1, without getting specific, will be done sometime "in the summer." She emphasized that the delay isn't related to technology problems, but rather a number of unexpected issues that needed resolving.
"It's just that there's a lot of advance planning required," she adds. "There's still an enormous amount of work to do."
One stumbling block has been security. When Toronto Hydro first unveiled its plan it also promised that the Wi-Fi zone would be free for anybody to access during its first six months of operation. The idea was to let citizens test drive the network before price plans were introduced.
This caught the attention of Toronto police, who were concerned that the free trial would invite abuse. What's stopping perverts from anonymously surfing the network for child pornography or terrorists from using the network to plot attacks on the city?
So the company had to come up with an authentication feature that allows it to accurately identify who is signing on to the network. During registration users will be asked to provide their cellphone number, after which the system will instantly send a text message containing a sign-on password to that person's cellphone.
By linking the registrant with a cellphone subscription, the company has a way of tracking people through their mobile phone company. It was enough to satisfy the police, but the result is that free access is limited to people who have cellphones — hundreds of thousands of Torontonians without cellphone subscriptions won't be able to enjoy the temporary free ride.
Safety was another issue that caught the utility off guard. The Toronto Board of Health raised questions about electromagnetic field exposure from the Wi-Fi devices and the potential effect of such a ubiquitous network on public health.
The board of health is reviewing a proposed "prudent avoidance" policy that would require that public exposure to radiofrequency in Toronto be 100 times lower than Health Canada's Safety Code 6 standard.
Gravelle and her team met with the board and presented data showing that the network design, the placement of the Wi-Fi equipment in proximity to the public, and the equipment itself all combined to meet those stringent requirements.
The final roadblock was more logistical in nature. Some of the streetlights have a 24-hours electricity feed. Others don't. The Wi-Fi equipment requires a constant supply of power to run day and night so with some streetlights the utility has had to wire up a feed, soaking up more precious time.
Back above the bucket truck, Sanayhie has almost finished installing his Bubba. It's only his fourth so far, and he's still trying to get the hang of it. The device comes from Ottawa-based Bel Air Networks Inc., but Siemens Canada Ltd. of Mississauga is the main contractor responsible for supplying and supporting the network. Motorola Corp. and Nortel Networks Corp. are among other giants trying to capture a share of this fast-emerging market.
"We're just getting started with all this so bear that in mind if you're timing us," says Gravelle, standing beside the green hydro truck. Sanayhie gets lowered back down.
The Star was timing him: 40 minutes from start to finish. Not bad. But the financial district only requires 13 Bubbas. The rest of the downtown core, targeted for completion by yearend, will require dozens more. Speed of installation will improve with experience, says Gravelle.
The grander plan of covering up to 10 square kilometres will require hundreds of devices, and with expansion potentially thousands.
The plan is not driven purely by the desire to spread broadband to the masses.
By 2010 most residences in Toronto must have a smart meter that allows the local utility to capture real-time data of a home's electricity use and to inform homeowners of time-of-day rates. To support such two-way communication, Toronto Hydro decided to select Wi-Fi technology for its smart meter program.
"If they underwrite it that way they'll get a return on investment based on that use. Once that network is built it's easier to expand it for other purposes," says Craig Settles, a municipal Wi-Fi expert in California and author of the recently released book, Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless. "Doing it the way Toronto is doing it makes more sense from a dollars and cents standpoint."
It helps that Toronto Hydro Telecom, which for five years has provided telecommunications and data services to hundreds of business customers, and already has an extensive fibre-optic network running under the city. This network, supported by an existing billing system and network control centre, can link together elements of the Wi-Fi Zone and connect users to the public Internet.
Settles says the cities that are most successful with their municipal Wi-Fi projects will be driven by a business case and not an over-hyped promise from politicians to offer free or cheap Internet access, often under the naïve belief that such a service can be supported by advertising.
Earlier this month, wireless tech company MobilePro Inc. pulled the plug on a deal with the city of Sacramento as it relied too much on advertising. MobilePro believed the project would become a financial dud because local politicians were insisting the service be a free-for-all.
"People are going to have to come to a reckoning about this whole issue of service being ad-driven," says Settles.
He says the floodgates opened for municipal Wi-Fi last fall when Internet service provider Earthlink won a revenue-sharing deal to deploy and manage a citywide network in Philadelphia, one of the earliest cities to embrace the muniwifi concept. "People saw it was real and it was going to happen."
The idea of using ads to support such a network captured headlines after Google proposed a plan to build a free-access network in San Francisco that would be supported by advertising alone. San Francisco is now leaning toward a two-tiered model: a for-pay service in partnership with Earthlink and a free service based on Google's advertising strategy.
"The good news is that it drove the concept to a high acceptance level, but the bad news is it's made people more politically expedient than technology expedient," says Settles.
"A number of city politicians have given the indication this is going to be free, it's going to be everywhere, and people's expectations are higher than what the cities are capable of delivering. Managing expectations is a very big thing."
Toronto Hydro does have high expectations, but make no mistake — it means business. The utility may be owned by the city, but that's where the municipality's direct involvement in this project stops. To answer the passerby's earlier question, no taxpayer dollars are subsidizing Toronto's Wi-Fi Zone. Funding is coming from Toronto Hydro Telecom with cash from its existing operations.
"At the core of this is a business enterprise," says Gravelle, adding that socially and civic-minded services will be layered on top, possibly ranging from wireless support for police services and city fleets to the creation of broadband access programs for low-income households and schools.
"They're all being discussed, and we'll work with the city to determine what's good for Toronto."
In essence, Toronto Hydro Telecom is positioning itself as a direct competitor to both the mobile phone companies and high-speed Internet providers such as Rogers Cable and Bell Canada.
High-speed signals from the Wi-Fi Zone are expected to reach into street-front stores, parts of office buildings up to 30 floors high, and into homes. Given the option of sampling the Wi-Fi service, some homeowners and businesses may decide to sever their ties with Bell or Rogers, which are likely to move swiftly to protect their markets.
As for the many for-pay "hotspots" randomly scattered throughout the city, in places like Starbucks and Second Cup, their days could soon be numbered. "Isn't that great?" said Toronto Hydro Telecom president Dave Dobbin, hardly able to hold in his enthusiasm during the March unveiling.
The utility hasn't announced price plans yet, but expect to see a combination of by-the-hour credit card access, access through pre-paid cards, and monthly plans that are slightly cheaper than standard home broadband offerings.
Dobbin is the driving force behind the initiative, having gained experience setting up a much smaller Wi-Fi zone in Ottawa through the local utility there. During a presentation at a recent telecom conference in Toronto, Dobbin arranged to receive a VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) call on a new Wi-Fi phone tucked away in his pocket. He was trying to show the audience how easily someone could avoid expensive cellphone charges by using the Wi-Fi Zone to make and receive voice calls on a portable phone.
Coverage may be limited to downtown, but the service could have major appeal for those who spend most for their time working and living in the city's core. "Let's say you have a small business that buys our VoIP service, for say $40 to $60 a month depending on the package," Dobbin tells the Star following his presentation.
"They get access to the Wi-Fi Zone, they buy the handset for a couple of hundred bucks. Now they've got a cordless phone they can use to go across the street to the coffee shop, move around the city, and not pay airtime. We think that's kind of cool."
Now imagine if similar Wi-Fi zones start popping up across Canada and roaming agreements set up between municipalities make it possible to log into your own account, regardless of which city you're in. Experts say this is the natural evolution of municipal Wi-Fi, and that it poses a major threat to incumbents in telecommunications industry.
"We're delivering a new type of service, technology and offering," says Gravelle, who diplomatically dismisses skeptics, such as mobile phone and Internet providers, already criticizing and downplaying the potential.
"Flashback to 1988. Cellular was exciting and interesting. I remember a number of different parties, such as landline (phone) operators, calling it a niche market. The mindset is it would be a two-year build cycle and then they'd stop.
"But they kept building and adding more."
Hydro's wireless push
Very soon Toronto Hydro will switch on the first phase of its new wireless broadband service. Watch out, Mr. Rogers. Beware, Ma Bell
Jun. 26, 2006. 06:40 AM
TYLER HAMILTON
A bucket truck raises Toronto Hydro worker Joey Sanayhie to the top of a streetlight at the corner of Yonge St. and Adelaide St., and with him a beer keg-shaped device known fondly in industry circles as "The Bubba."
Several co-workers wearing hard hats look on, catching the attention of one passerby at the busy downtown intersection. "Is this one of those, `How many people does it take to change a lightbulb' kind of things?" she jokes, following up with a more serious zinger. "Hope this isn't costing taxpayers."
The "lightbulb" or "Bubba" in question is actually a wireless router, one of dozens that the telecom subsidiary of Toronto Hydro is installing throughout the downtown core and gradually across the city.
The company announced plans in March to create the largest Wi-Fi zone in Canada, making it possible for laptop-toting citizens, workers and tourists to access a high-speed link to the Internet virtually anywhere — bus stops, park benches, office towers, bar patios, indoor cafes and stores, you name it.
The utility's $60-million purchase last year of Toronto's streetlight system will be key to the deployment. The wireless equipment can be easily mounted near the top of each light pole, which offers the added bonus of electricity for powering the so-called mesh network.
It's an ambitious undertaking, similar to other projects in major cities across North America. Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Seattle are just a few of municipalities blanketing their public areas with invisible, ubiquitous broadband on-ramps. What mayor looking for re-election wouldn't embrace such an opportunity?
"The applications for Torontonians and our various city agencies, from libraries to public transportation and safety, to economic development, make this a historic moment in Toronto's development as a world-class city," Mayor David Miller boasted during the March announcement.
But the effort is already a few weeks behind schedule, demonstrating that the complexity of building a municipal Wi-Fi or "muniwifi" network stretches well beyond technology. The first phase of deployment around the city's financial district was supposed to be complete by the end of June. The goal here is to provide coverage northward from Front St. to Queen St. and westward from Church St. to Spadina Ave.
Sharyn Gravelle, vice-president of wireless at Toronto Hydro Telecom, says the June deadline will be missed and that Phase 1, without getting specific, will be done sometime "in the summer." She emphasized that the delay isn't related to technology problems, but rather a number of unexpected issues that needed resolving.
"It's just that there's a lot of advance planning required," she adds. "There's still an enormous amount of work to do."
One stumbling block has been security. When Toronto Hydro first unveiled its plan it also promised that the Wi-Fi zone would be free for anybody to access during its first six months of operation. The idea was to let citizens test drive the network before price plans were introduced.
This caught the attention of Toronto police, who were concerned that the free trial would invite abuse. What's stopping perverts from anonymously surfing the network for child pornography or terrorists from using the network to plot attacks on the city?
So the company had to come up with an authentication feature that allows it to accurately identify who is signing on to the network. During registration users will be asked to provide their cellphone number, after which the system will instantly send a text message containing a sign-on password to that person's cellphone.
By linking the registrant with a cellphone subscription, the company has a way of tracking people through their mobile phone company. It was enough to satisfy the police, but the result is that free access is limited to people who have cellphones — hundreds of thousands of Torontonians without cellphone subscriptions won't be able to enjoy the temporary free ride.
Safety was another issue that caught the utility off guard. The Toronto Board of Health raised questions about electromagnetic field exposure from the Wi-Fi devices and the potential effect of such a ubiquitous network on public health.
The board of health is reviewing a proposed "prudent avoidance" policy that would require that public exposure to radiofrequency in Toronto be 100 times lower than Health Canada's Safety Code 6 standard.
Gravelle and her team met with the board and presented data showing that the network design, the placement of the Wi-Fi equipment in proximity to the public, and the equipment itself all combined to meet those stringent requirements.
The final roadblock was more logistical in nature. Some of the streetlights have a 24-hours electricity feed. Others don't. The Wi-Fi equipment requires a constant supply of power to run day and night so with some streetlights the utility has had to wire up a feed, soaking up more precious time.
Back above the bucket truck, Sanayhie has almost finished installing his Bubba. It's only his fourth so far, and he's still trying to get the hang of it. The device comes from Ottawa-based Bel Air Networks Inc., but Siemens Canada Ltd. of Mississauga is the main contractor responsible for supplying and supporting the network. Motorola Corp. and Nortel Networks Corp. are among other giants trying to capture a share of this fast-emerging market.
"We're just getting started with all this so bear that in mind if you're timing us," says Gravelle, standing beside the green hydro truck. Sanayhie gets lowered back down.
The Star was timing him: 40 minutes from start to finish. Not bad. But the financial district only requires 13 Bubbas. The rest of the downtown core, targeted for completion by yearend, will require dozens more. Speed of installation will improve with experience, says Gravelle.
The grander plan of covering up to 10 square kilometres will require hundreds of devices, and with expansion potentially thousands.
The plan is not driven purely by the desire to spread broadband to the masses.
By 2010 most residences in Toronto must have a smart meter that allows the local utility to capture real-time data of a home's electricity use and to inform homeowners of time-of-day rates. To support such two-way communication, Toronto Hydro decided to select Wi-Fi technology for its smart meter program.
"If they underwrite it that way they'll get a return on investment based on that use. Once that network is built it's easier to expand it for other purposes," says Craig Settles, a municipal Wi-Fi expert in California and author of the recently released book, Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless. "Doing it the way Toronto is doing it makes more sense from a dollars and cents standpoint."
It helps that Toronto Hydro Telecom, which for five years has provided telecommunications and data services to hundreds of business customers, and already has an extensive fibre-optic network running under the city. This network, supported by an existing billing system and network control centre, can link together elements of the Wi-Fi Zone and connect users to the public Internet.
Settles says the cities that are most successful with their municipal Wi-Fi projects will be driven by a business case and not an over-hyped promise from politicians to offer free or cheap Internet access, often under the naïve belief that such a service can be supported by advertising.
Earlier this month, wireless tech company MobilePro Inc. pulled the plug on a deal with the city of Sacramento as it relied too much on advertising. MobilePro believed the project would become a financial dud because local politicians were insisting the service be a free-for-all.
"People are going to have to come to a reckoning about this whole issue of service being ad-driven," says Settles.
He says the floodgates opened for municipal Wi-Fi last fall when Internet service provider Earthlink won a revenue-sharing deal to deploy and manage a citywide network in Philadelphia, one of the earliest cities to embrace the muniwifi concept. "People saw it was real and it was going to happen."
The idea of using ads to support such a network captured headlines after Google proposed a plan to build a free-access network in San Francisco that would be supported by advertising alone. San Francisco is now leaning toward a two-tiered model: a for-pay service in partnership with Earthlink and a free service based on Google's advertising strategy.
"The good news is that it drove the concept to a high acceptance level, but the bad news is it's made people more politically expedient than technology expedient," says Settles.
"A number of city politicians have given the indication this is going to be free, it's going to be everywhere, and people's expectations are higher than what the cities are capable of delivering. Managing expectations is a very big thing."
Toronto Hydro does have high expectations, but make no mistake — it means business. The utility may be owned by the city, but that's where the municipality's direct involvement in this project stops. To answer the passerby's earlier question, no taxpayer dollars are subsidizing Toronto's Wi-Fi Zone. Funding is coming from Toronto Hydro Telecom with cash from its existing operations.
"At the core of this is a business enterprise," says Gravelle, adding that socially and civic-minded services will be layered on top, possibly ranging from wireless support for police services and city fleets to the creation of broadband access programs for low-income households and schools.
"They're all being discussed, and we'll work with the city to determine what's good for Toronto."
In essence, Toronto Hydro Telecom is positioning itself as a direct competitor to both the mobile phone companies and high-speed Internet providers such as Rogers Cable and Bell Canada.
High-speed signals from the Wi-Fi Zone are expected to reach into street-front stores, parts of office buildings up to 30 floors high, and into homes. Given the option of sampling the Wi-Fi service, some homeowners and businesses may decide to sever their ties with Bell or Rogers, which are likely to move swiftly to protect their markets.
As for the many for-pay "hotspots" randomly scattered throughout the city, in places like Starbucks and Second Cup, their days could soon be numbered. "Isn't that great?" said Toronto Hydro Telecom president Dave Dobbin, hardly able to hold in his enthusiasm during the March unveiling.
The utility hasn't announced price plans yet, but expect to see a combination of by-the-hour credit card access, access through pre-paid cards, and monthly plans that are slightly cheaper than standard home broadband offerings.
Dobbin is the driving force behind the initiative, having gained experience setting up a much smaller Wi-Fi zone in Ottawa through the local utility there. During a presentation at a recent telecom conference in Toronto, Dobbin arranged to receive a VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) call on a new Wi-Fi phone tucked away in his pocket. He was trying to show the audience how easily someone could avoid expensive cellphone charges by using the Wi-Fi Zone to make and receive voice calls on a portable phone.
Coverage may be limited to downtown, but the service could have major appeal for those who spend most for their time working and living in the city's core. "Let's say you have a small business that buys our VoIP service, for say $40 to $60 a month depending on the package," Dobbin tells the Star following his presentation.
"They get access to the Wi-Fi Zone, they buy the handset for a couple of hundred bucks. Now they've got a cordless phone they can use to go across the street to the coffee shop, move around the city, and not pay airtime. We think that's kind of cool."
Now imagine if similar Wi-Fi zones start popping up across Canada and roaming agreements set up between municipalities make it possible to log into your own account, regardless of which city you're in. Experts say this is the natural evolution of municipal Wi-Fi, and that it poses a major threat to incumbents in telecommunications industry.
"We're delivering a new type of service, technology and offering," says Gravelle, who diplomatically dismisses skeptics, such as mobile phone and Internet providers, already criticizing and downplaying the potential.
"Flashback to 1988. Cellular was exciting and interesting. I remember a number of different parties, such as landline (phone) operators, calling it a niche market. The mindset is it would be a two-year build cycle and then they'd stop.
"But they kept building and adding more."
