After years of delays, missed deadlines (the original due date for Central Park was fall 2005) Wi-Fi Salon has finally thrown in the towel because it could not find corporate sponsors.
The original agreement, made in 2004, called for Wi-Fi Salon to pay the city’s Parks Dept. $90,000 over three years for the right to wire 10 parks in four boroughs, including Central Park. (The deal was extended once, for an additional $30,000 for a fourth year.) The plan was apparently to raise corporate funds to make up the shortfall caused by the relatively minuscule concession fee. Without sponsorships to sustain the operating costs, the company’s founder, Marshall W. Brown, said he had no choice but to shut it down.
I am personally dumbfounded by this entire farce. According to OpenWiFi.com there are 169 public parks in the U.S. that provide free W-Fi. This includes nine in Kentucky alone. That’s nine. And here, in the NYC, in Central Park, the heart of Manhattan and the world’s most famous public space, we have none. That’s zero. Kentucky nine. Central Park zero. It’s an embarrassment to the city to think that this critical service at the center of the most important cultural and economic, not to mentiuon tourist, center on the planet was left to languish for years. It defies common sense to think that a corporate sponsor could not be found that wouldn’t be happy to brand a Wi-Fi connection in Central Park. They find sponsors for everything else. The Marathon, the Opera, David Blaine hanging upside down like a bat. All sponsored events. An internet service that could be used by the 25 milion people that visit the park each year, no. It sounds to me like the deal in Brooklyn when they couldn’t get cable service for years. And it wasn’t because they didn’t have it wired.
Then again, given politics in New York, I suppose we should be thankful they didn’t find some way to award the franchise to the carriage-horse industry.
Dear John,
The hack job visited upon me by The New York Times and Sewell Chen in writing about this see – http://www.wifisalon.com/2009/01/sewell-chan-new-york-times-cit.html — has left me to track down various postings to correct the ensuing misconceptions and attempt to ‘set the record straight.’ Your readers can read my blog posts around this. Bottom line — there was Wi-Fi in Central Park. For years, in seven locations.
There has been a lot of uninformed armchair criticism here. I take that on at http://www.wifisalon.com/blog as well.
I agree that there should in theory be a number of sponsors interested in this opportunity, even in this economic climate.
Ironically, it was my not being able to get a commitment in time that shed light on the fact that we need this.
Here is a history I posted on GigaOm http://gigaom.com/2009/01/06/in-new-york-downturn-kills-free-wifi/#comment-920962 that offers a good summary of the turn of events:
Dear Om,
I write here to put some things into the public record, correct some misperceptions, and perhaps offer some hope for public Wi-Fi.
I ran Wi-Fi Salon for five years, and none if it was easy. Raising money, securing sponsorship, building a 17 location network in the middle of ten of New York’s most prominent parks, usually large parks like Central Park or Prospect, where a working DSL line and even electricity was hard to find.
The fulll buildout, starting in June 2006, was particularly painful. None of the park house locations where we set up had physical addresses in the Verizon database. They’d dispatch a technician, he’d show up blocks away outside the park, never find us, never phoned, and so it went. When we in time got lucky enough to find the technician to get him to the location, the state of the DSL lines, the copper running under the park was such that it was very often hard to find a working pair of wires to connect the line. As we were usually 5000+ feet from a Central Office, the connection was often shaky. It took between 12-15 tech visits to get the line in, and then there often were outages given the conditions.
Seven months and $500K later we were up and running in all 17 locations. Only then were we allowed to announce that we had a network up, but by then it was winter. That’s city politics for you. We missed the entire summer season in 2006 as a result. In addition, hiring people to stand around in the parks waiting for people who never showed up for seven months cost me $250K.
Please note that at no time throughout all this did the city offer to pay for any of this. We were in fact under contract with the parks department to pay them $7500 per quarter. Over the 4 years that we held the concession, I paid parks $120K.
We were in fact all set for our second renewal for 2009, and needed but to pay our concession fee for Q3 and for Q4, which would have been the first quarter of the new concession year (It ran from September 30th to September 30th). The problem was, September hit. Marketing budgets slashed, Wall Street imploding. Despite that, we had a written commitment for a sponsorship for 2009, secured at the eleventh hour — this being December 5th — and hoped that this commitment would suffice until this sponsor was able to turn around a check to us. They had had a number of layoffs as well, and just getting them to the table again was difficult because a lot fell to those that hadn’t been fired.
This wasn’t enough for NYC Parks, however. We didn’t pay our bill by the deadline, and so we lost the concession. I am actually fine with that. The cost of building and maintaining the network over the last four years was about $1.3 million. Running things for 2009 was going to cost me another $10K a month, and that is before one took into consideration that the equipment, now about 3 years old, needed a major upgrade — to Altai — and with that the backhaul had to be switched from DSL to fixed wireless to handle the new demand. We also needed to relocate about a half dozen underutilized locations, especially in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn so that we were not providing Wi-Fi in the middle of a large park, but right where people naturally congregated. Call it the Bryant Park/Union Square model. The bill for that would have been $400-500K, but it would have been well worth it.
To attract sponsors, to put on meaningful marketing events, we needed to have an infrastructure capable of supporting 100+ simultaneous users. Old technology is old news. We put out a network for a one day event in Central Park September 15th — The Global Out of Office Day, which was sponsored by Sheraton, and Pepsi, with Microsoft and LinkedIn presenting. The network, using 4 Altais set up the night before, and powered by a 45 Mbps fixed wireless link from Rainbow Broadband, was capable of supporting 600 users. This is a capacity, btw, that Wired Towns can project to a number of public spaces in New York and otherwise.
We had been using Altais on an event basis for Nokia in Washington Square Park, Union Square Park, and Columbus Circle throughout the spring and summer of 2007 and were amazed at its capability, how it was able to cut through all the RF interference and deliver a strong signal at distances we’d never seen before.
In November 2007 then we dropped one into Washington Square Park. It was cold, the park was closed for renovation, there was little press. Our usage went up 10 fold overnight. We were streaming video on an iPhone 800 feet away Non Line of Sight.
By April, it was clear that with the traffic numbers we were seeing we could make a business out of this via advertising. We then decided to put all our efforts in to establishing Wired Towns to meet this new opportunity. Specifically, we decided the market was with Business Improvement Districts. We signed a deal with The Union Square Partnership and since September we have been seeing 300+ users a day. The aim is to support BID members through local maps and listings, and through local wireless and web marketing services and applications.
There are 58 other BIDs in NYC and may other BIDs around the country, and any number of small towns where this service would be of use.
We now have a partnership with a global company with 830+ wireless engineers. We can deploy Altais and our local community portal solution as a bundle anywhere we can get backhaul, electricity, and a place to mount the antennas. That is the future of Wi-Fi, or of wireless generally as the white spaces open up and as the Obama Administration takes charge and such digital inclusion initiatives gain more support.
I am very excited about what’s ahead, but then I’ve always been. With the flood of new devices hitting the market — netbooks, the iPhones of course and their many imitators and competitors, with the gear getting so much better, and with location based content advertising and services coming in to play, public Wi-Fi is far from done; it’s really only beginning.
In a downturn especially with hundreds of thousands of local business at risk, they need a way to market their services both locally and on the web.