Word: downtowner
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...iconic style magazine marks its quarter century Summits of Style Esoteric treatments in a minimalist setting A Starflyer Is Born In-flight comfort with an internet connection in every seat Take a Hike Destinations to restore your sense of wonder Recently given a welcome face-lift, buildings lining downtown K.L.'s restored heritage rows boast soaring ceilings, wrought-iron balconies and timber balustrades. Some of these 1930s gems - in an Art Deco style adapted for the tropics - also have air wells open to the sky. "People are beginning to realize the past has value," says Lim Huck Chin, a conservation...
...sound like a secondary weapons system from the starship Enterprise, the phased-array antennas are actually large, featureless beige-and-gray nubbins that sit unassumingly next to AC units on rooftops. It's almost impossible to pick them out of the skyline, though there are six of them in downtown Spokane, along with 12 smaller "bridge routers" that help fill in shadows cast by buildings. Jim West, Spokane's mayor, likes to point out that a few years ago, perennial rival Tacoma dubbed itself America's No. 1 Wired City. What do you think of your fancy wires now, Tacoma...
...there's a lot more going on here than meets the eye. Spokane is actually a radical experiment in urban wireless technology, a live-in laboratory where city-employed nerds are crash-testing the wireless technotopia of the future. All of downtown Spokane, including the park that I was sitting in, is a massive wi-fi hot spot, a whole neighborhood enveloped in an invisible field of high-volume Internet access that covers 100 city blocks. The same way some libraries and coffeehouses offer wireless Internet access, all of downtown Spokane is a wireless surfing zone...
...scurrying about, carrying little slips of paper with numbers on them--exactly the kind of problem technology is supposed to eliminate. So somebody had the bright idea of sticking one of Vivato's prototype wi-fi transmitters on top of Spokane city hall and flooding a few blocks of downtown with wi-fi, thus allowing all the scoring to be done online. The setup was about as ugly a piece of jerry-built hackery as you're ever likely to see--the workers ended up bolting one of Vivato's phased-array antennas onto an extra Hoopfest backboard...
Meanwhile, a local commercial ISP called 180 Networks had been studying ways that urban wi-fi could attract more people to Spokane's downtown area, which was in need of a little revitalizing. As Starbucks has learned, people tend to hang out more if there's free Internet access to be had. They check their e-mail. They linger. And while they're lingering, they spend money. Light bulbs started appearing over people's heads all over town. Why not make downtown one big wireless zone? The city geeks, the Vivato geeks, the 180 Networks geeks and a local business...