The California city of about 1 million intends to offer high-speed Wi-Fi throughout its downtown, covering an area of 1.5 square miles (3.9 square kilometers) in the middle of this year. But unlike earlier municipal Wi-Fi initiatives, such as that would have covered San Francisco, the San Jose system will be able to pay for itself entirely by helping the government do its job.
In the middle of the past decade, ambitious projects in several cities, including parts of San Jose, promised to blanket outdoor areas with Wi-Fi and provide built-in sources of revenue. Home broadband subscriptions, browser-based advertising or small-business use would help to pay for equipment and operations. But those complicated business models depended on assumptions that often proved unfounded.
By contrast, San Jose's new plan is fairly simple. The network will cost about US$94,000 to buy and set up, and then about $22,000 per year to run and maintain, acting CIO Vijay Sammeta said. Benefits to the city will include better connections for city employees and for satellite fire station offices. It will also provide better connectivity for wireless parking meters, and for signs that guide drivers to parking garages using real-time information on the number of spaces available, Sammeta said.
At the same time, the network will offer a way for people working in or visiting downtown to stay connected outdoors and in restaurants and other businesses, he said. San Jose estimates the downtown area has a daytime population of about 50,000, and the city has been striving for years to get workers to leave their offices and make the district more lively and lucrative for small businesses.
The public-facing part of the network will be open and unsecured, so users won't have to sign in or provide a password. The city won't estimate how fast the system will be until it's installed and tested, but Sammeta said users should be able to share a total of 1Gbps (bits per second) or more. One-quarter to one-third of the access points will be directly linked to the city's wired network via fiber connections, while others will be tethered via Wi-Fi mesh.