The first big connection. (dcnet.dc.gov)

Last week, Mayor Vince Gray announced the connection of the nation's first 100-gigabit municipal fiber network, called DC-CAN. With the backbone funded by a federal stimulus grant, it's a huge step forward for internet connections in government facilities like recreation centers and police stations. It's also a very good deal for big non-profits like Bread for the City and So Others Might Eat, which need strong, reliable, secure connections—and can afford the $470 per month baseline cost.

One of the system's big selling points, though, was that it would allow entrepreneurs a chance to build out the "last mile" connection from that fiber backbone into homes and small businesses in underserved areas, since the D.C. government is prohibited by law from doing so itself. In addition, because the routers D.C. is using aren't "meshable," it's harder for the institutions that have hooked into the network to easily spread their wireless signal over long distances (like what's going on in Bloomingdale, which has the potential to cover a much larger area).

That part, it seems, isn't moving very quickly. Right now, DC-CAN is offering its "backhaul" at prices that aren't significantly less than commercial providers like Comcast and Verizon already offer. Martha Huizenga, of Capitol Hill-based internet service provider D.C. Access, says it's not worth her while to work with DC-CAN.

"In the future we hope to, but the pricing we received initially was not as good as the pricing we have with our current vendors," she says. “If you're not drastically less expensive than a big telecom company, then why would I go with you over them? I guess I really want to see a big price differential, because that's what they keep talking about.”

The Office of the Chief Technology Officer's Jack Burbridge says that their service isn't cheaper because it's better: More reliable and secure, with guaranteed service, and discounts if you don't use the full bandwidth. Which is great if you're someone who needs to handle things like medical records, but not such a bargain if you just need basic access.

Burbridge says that OCTO is in discussions with the private sector to start building out the last mile to consumers, but wouldn't name the companies (although he says Comcast and Verizon are among them). To entice them into underserved areas, OCTO will be putting together a package of incentives that will offer the service at lower rates in wards 5, 7, and 8—which will hopefully bring it within reach of the smaller, local businesses that can then bring internet to their neighbors (it's been done successfully elsewhere).

At the moment, though, Comcast is already offering very cheap internet to low-income families with kids in D.C. through a program arranged as a consequence of its merger with NBC. That's great, but right now it doesn't do much to encourage investment in longer-term connections through DC-CAN. The Comcast program expires after three years. After that, it's likely that families will let their subscriptions lapse, or just buy what they're used to, at market rate.

So, high hopes for D.C.'s municipal wireless internet infrastructure. Big improvements necessary to make it live up to its potential.

DC-CAN creates 10 public access nodes, for networks that could look like Bloomingdale's. (Brooke Hatfield)

Like many new things in Bloomingdale, the plan to create a neighborhood-wide free wireless Internet cloud involves Big Bear Café at 1st and R streets NW. But where the café’s liquor license fight highlighted divisions within the gentrifying neighborhood, this plan began with a whiskey-fueled conversation about how to transcend them.

“A few neighbors sitting around the café saw that there was a communications gap,” explains Hugh Youngblood, a tech entrepreneur who has since taken over café owner Stuart Davenport’s seat on the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission. If they could at least get everyone access to a popular neighborhood e-mail list, they reasoned, that would go a long way toward filling the digital void.

The problem: Though Big Bear hosts laptop-toting hordes, many neighbors lack home Internet access. The relatively simple fix: With a few dozen routers at $60 apiece—and access to the city’s fiber optic network—Youngblood et al could create a Wi-Fi cloud around 1st Street NW. “We just said, let’s start giving away free Internet,” Youngblood remembers.

The actual process was a bit trickier. At first, they tried to put a signal tower on top of McKinley Technical High School in nearby Eckington, but that was deemed unworkable. Then they thought they might be able to do it from Dunbar Senior High School on New Jersey Avenue NW, but security concerns led the city to offer only a tiny trickle of bandwidth—not enough for the Big Bear crew to wire a whole neighborhood.

Finally, the group gave up on city assistance, turning to a local IT company that could get them a commercial broadband subscription. They set up “gateway” routers at Big Bear and in Rustik Tavern and then started knocking on doors to ask whether homeowners wouldn’t mind hosting a free “repeater.” For a few hundred dollars in hardware and about $800 a year for broadband, a six-block long stretch of houses now has WiFi access—for much less than the cost of individually subscribing each area household to Verizon or Comcast.

For Youngblood, wiring the neighborhood is worth it because of what he can then build on top: Through his company, Youngblood Capital Group, he hopes to develop a “smart grid” in the area that could support things like solar energy systems. “You build the network, and then you’ve got this fertile field you can grow everything in,” he says.

In the not-too-distant future, however, groups like the one in Bloomingdale may not have to pay Comcast or Verizon at all. Last year, the city received a $17.4 million in federal stimulus money for a fiber optic network designed not for the city government but for the public at large. Such grants were sprinkled around the country as part of the Obama administration’s broadband initiative, but most are in rural areas. D.C. will be the biggest city to build its own consumer-oriented network.

The catch? The D.C. Community Access Network (DC-CAN) will be what’s called a “middle mile” network, which is just a central communications backbone. Private businesses and non-profits, from large cable companies to grassroots initiatives like Bloomingdale's Broadband Bridge, are supposed to provide the “last mile,” which brings the Internet to consumers.

That makes DC-CAN the first meaningful opportunity to break the Comcast-Verizon duopoly that’s governed broadband communication in the District since Uncle Sam and the courts allowed big carriers to run small providers out of the market. But DC-CAN, scheduled for completion in 2013, is going to need some entrepreneurial moxie: So far, the big two haven’t expressed interest in participating, and only five relatively small companies answered the District government’s request for information on the network.

“Right now they’re in the stage of, if we build it, would you come?” says Martha Huizenga, a partner at one of those companies, the independent Capitol Hill- and Dupont Circle-area provider D.C. Access. “And we’re like, ‘Yes, we will come, but at the right price.’”

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This isn’t the District’s first attempt to create a municipally-supported wireless network to help low-income residents. The last such plan, alas, failed before it started. In 2006, then-D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams’ administration asked companies to bid for the right to build commercial wireless transmitters on District-owned streetlights and buildings—with permission to access D.C.’s own fiber optic network. Winners, though, would be obliged to offer free wireless services in needy neighborhoods. Nobody even bid, and the plan died.

Williams’ effort came as municipal wireless schemes were flopping nationwide. Private carriers tapped to build systems in cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia found the projects to be much more complicated and expensive than they had anticipated. As telecom giants put out research attacking city-supported consumer broadband systems as anticompetitive, local governments abandoned Wi-Fi ambitions. Other critics speculated that, in a business like Internet service, government programs would never be able to adapt to rapid year-to-year changes in technology.

But another District-run wireless effort shows the city is no slouch in that category. DC-NET, a six-year-old high-speed fiber optic system for public institutions, has earned a stellar reputation, winning a national award last year for city broadband networks. It’s good enough that the federal Office of Personnel Management pays the District to use it—a rare example of the feds purchasing anything from the D.C. government—and still saves money over the commercial carriers.

The big companies, though, are still serious competition. In a competitive bid process, the national nonprofit group One Economy chose Comcast over DC-NET as the provider on a $1.2 million, federally-funded effort to provide wireless Internet services for 1,500 District public housing units. Residents who subscribe will pay nothing for the first two years, and then $10 per month after that.

Meanwhile, the city’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer says it has no money to fund projects like Bloomingdale's in other areas. A similar effort in Anacostia, for instance, is still waiting for someone like Youngblood to step up and foot the bill. Not every neighborhood has a benevolent resident entrepreneur and legions of bloggy types who feel entitled to Wi-Fi in bed.

Fortunately, these kinds of projects are set up to thrive without government watering: The more invested communities are in creating their wireless cloud, which requires neighbors to know each other and work together, the longer they’re likely to last. For that reason, the New America Foundation, which has been a cheerleader for community wireless projects, sees them as superior to any kind of subscription service, hosted by telecoms or not.

“The Internet is not something that people should have to sign up on,” says the foundation’s Preston Rhea. “The Internet is something that people can actually help produce and create."

As someone who writes on the Internet all day for a living, you'd think I'd just suck it up and spring for the wireless. Hell, you'd think my employer would suck it up and spring for the wireless. But you would be underestimating my laziness, cheapness, and hubris—not to mention the whole bankruptcy thing.

I used to be like you. I had my own ten-character password consisting of numbers, letters, and symbols. I could stream entire episodes of Lost without interruption. I paid for the Internet. But a few months ago, one of my house-mates moved out and, in a bizarre act of vindication—long story—took our shared wireless router with her. My housemates and I are still "thinking about getting wireless." In the meantime, I've been living on the edge, searching for rogue, unprotected wireless connections that lurk just within my windows.

Join me.

* Survey the landscape. Boot up your laptop. (If you don't have a laptop, buy a laptop and boot it up). Take a look at your neighbor's Internet connection names that pop up in your wireless menu. Begin speculating as to which neighbor chose the name "fuzznuggets." Take note of the names that aren't password-protected, and prepare to both cherish and resent them, depending on their signal strength. "Linksys," baby, if you're reading this, I appreciate everything you've done for me.

* Maneuver. Make sure your laptop is good and charged, and then stalk through every floor and room of your house, holding the computer open and checking signal strength every couple of steps. Check out the front and back yards, too—you might be putting in some overtime on the stoop this summer. Take care to scope out the wireless scene near walls and windows, but don't discount the idea that there may be some pockets of signal strength in the interior. If you find a good spot and then lose the connection, moving or rotating the machine a couple inches can sometimes work wonders.

* Rearrange your furniture to fit the hot spots. In my living arrangement, the desk is pushed all the way to the back of the house for a reason. Our other workspace (okay, my bed) is pushed all the way to the front. Downstairs, you'll often find a stray living-room chair cozied up next to the trash near the back door of the kitchen—it may not be the loveliest space in the house, but it's the sweetest spot we've got.

* Prepare to brew some conspiracy theories. I am firm in my belief that the nearly-transluscent bedroom curtain that hangs between my laptop and the open window causes airspace interference, and must be tied back for optimal connection speeds. My boyfriend, who finds this preposterous, believes that the couple squatting in the abandoned row-house next door lack electricity, but still shell out the cash for their own wireless signal. Alas, it is password-protected.

* Don't try to watch videos. It's not worth it.

* Don't panic. A couple months ago, there were a few days where we thought our main source of poached Internet would be lost to us forever. This particular access-point is kind of like the neighborhood bicycle of Internet connections—we can get it in the front of the house, in the back of the house, on the first floor and on the third. The connection didn't suddenly decide to require a password to access it—it just disappeared. For days. It eventually came back, but there was an upside to it leaving us unconnected for a time—we were forced to find another unprotected connection that we've been hooking up with ever since.

* Look on the bright side. On days when the rogue Internet connections just aren't coming your way, take it as an opportunity to leave your work—and useless online procrastination—in the office. Also, take a step back and realize that you've begun bestowing your neighbors' Internet connections with pet names. ("Here, neener neener!") Sometimes, it's good to take a break.

* Know the risks. The FCC defers to local law-enforcement on this one. On the local level, unauthorized use of another's wireless network is usually only prosecuted when a crime is committed—if you use the network to download illegal pornography, say, or to send out spam.

* Never tell your neighbors that you do this.

* Give back to the community. When you get your own Internet connection, you can always leave it unprotected in an act of solidarity. For a more secure option, you can also give a donation to Open Park, a local non-profit committed to providing free public Internet in hotspots around the Washington, D.C. area. Some open wireless networks are meant to be that way—find one near you.

Photo by altemark.