New York: Not-So-WIRED CITY

In the beginning, there was warchalking. As the oft-related story goes, in 2002 web designer Matt Jones decided to take his laptop, with a newly acquired wifi card, on a walk around London. From the "cloud" of coverage created by overlapping unsecured wireless broadband networks in city offices, he found he could connect to the Internet. Then, drawing inspiration from the signs marked by hobos during the American Depression, Jones began to chalk up symbols to tell other would-be Internet users when they had arrived at a "hotspot" location.

Four years later, the idea of being able to gain a wireless connection to the Internet anywhere has exploded. Philadelphia will become the largest single population to implement a network later this year. Sixteen other American cities have already awarded contracts to companies, almost all of them small and independent, to provide free or low cost wireless broadband for public use.

New York City lags far behind all of these municipalities. "Politicians [here] don't know the difference between a server and a waiter," said Andrew Rasiej, who ran for public advocate last year on a platform of providing municipal wireless broadband. "This is a city that made most of its money in the Industrial Age, and the people who control most of its power structures are Baby Boomers who don't know much about technology."

The city inched closer to municipal wireless broadband last December when the City Council passed a bill creating a special taskforce to advise Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on technological options for "unwiring" New York, but this has stalled in the new session. Impatient activist groups have taken matters into their own hands.

NYCwireless has installed wireless networks in Bryant Park, Union Square Park, Tompkins Square Park, Bowling Green Park, City Hall Park, and South Street Seaport. The group also maintains a database for users to identify neighborhood "hotspots." And in keeping with the original, co-operative sentiments of Jones' activity, the group provides open-source software, free of charge, to any apartment building or block that wants to build its own "mesh" wireless network.

For around $5,000, a tech-savvy apartment resident can attach a "router" to a physical Internet connection in the building, and plug in two or three access points at electrical points on each floor of a typical six-storey building, according to NYCwireless Executive Director Dana Spiegel. These access points transmit wireless signals to residents on each floor, creating a "mesh": a network that has no identifiable center-or owner-because each computer added creates more paths of connection.

Organizations like NYCwireless can afford to give away their creations-often enhanced versions of other groups' work across the country-because they've entirely bypassed the hefty research and development investment costs of the major telecommunications companies. "It's not this black box, über-technology that requires zillions of dollars to do," said Sascha Meinrath, project director of the Champaign-Urbana [Illinois] Community Wireless Network, whose software was developed by part-time volunteers sitting around drinking coffee and testing ideas.

To many, the municipal wireless movement challenges the very concept of ownership: making a traditionally privately held utility available to everyone for next to nothing. Spiegel said communal networks brought people together. Discussing the recent New York Times feature, "Hey neighbor, stop piggy-backing on my wireless," Spiegel said, "That's completely wrong. It should be, 'Hey neighbor, it's great to finally meet you.'"

Unsurprisingly, the giant telephone companies have made no secret of their hostility to the new technology. They are currently lobbying intensely at a federal level and in 15 states to pass laws banning municipalities from providing free wireless broadband, citing anti-monopoly concerns. Several traditional companies, including New York City's main Internet providers Verizon and Time Warner Cable, impose non-sharing policies on users.

Spiegel pointed out that there was no law against sharing an Internet connection. NYCwireless recommends ISPs that do not restrict use in this way, and instructs users how to set up security software to prevent harm to computers on a network.

Groups like NYCwireless see wireless broadband as bridging socio-economic divides as well as bringing smaller communities together. While Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum has openly dismissed Internet access as a priority for low-income communities, NYCwireless secretary Laura Forlano describes a home broadband connection as helping users to find jobs and retail bargains. "Everyone knows public libraries are crowded and can only offer limited time online," she said. "If you're a single mother, you may only be able to go online at midnight."

Of course, first that single mother needs a computer to take advantage of the broadband connection around her-and to be able to read the information that she finds online. Washington, D.C.-based not-for-profit OneEconomy bulk-buys and refurbishes cheap computers for low-income communities in New York, and also runs TheBeehive.org, a Web site that offers simple English and Spanish information about money management and school choice.

Christian Sandvig, assistant professor of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sees community wireless challenging the very content of the Internet. "A lot of the ways these services are currently offered [by traditional telcos] create consumers beholden to existing media outlets," he said, because they prohibit users from uploading content as quickly as they download it. On many communal mesh networks, users can host their own blogs, Web sites and even radio programs.

Will telcos eventually succumb to this grassroots pressure, perhaps eventually bidding for municipal contracts themselves? Sandvig finds potential for reconciliation in the history of the spread of telephones in rural areas, where users organized into local co-operatives and ordered insulators and climbing spurs to scale electricity poles and install their own telephone kits. "There was the idea that the telephone was something you built yourself," he said. "It doesn't mean it stayed that way."