Word: stalter
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...telling this story, Stalter likes to punch up his patter with wireless-industry slang. When he talks about bringing wi-fi to an area, he says he's going to "paint it!" or "light it up!" But the reality isn't that dramatic. Though they 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...
Half the suggestions the city people came up with were news to Vivato. "They sat down and said, 'You know what we're using this for?'" Stalter said. "They're listing the applications. We had no idea. We don't know what the meter maid does all day." Now fire fighters can download the floor plans of burning buildings while they're on the way to the scene, right down to the room where the oily rags are stored. In the next few months the city is planning to give fire fighters clip-on webcams that can stream video back...
...your privacy. And there's such a thing as too much info. Stick a wi-fi-enabled camera on a streetlamp, stick a solar panel on the camera for power, and suddenly you have got cheap, instant 24-hr. streaming-video surveillance. "How many cities wouldn't want that?" Stalter asks rhetorically. "So Blade Runner is happening." (I think he means 1984, but same difference...
...this access for free? Vivato's technology appealed to Spokane not only because it's hugely powerful but also because it's absurdly inexpensive. You can get a Vivato transmitter for under $10,000, plus maintenance and bandwidth costs. "It's something like the Internet in the mid-'90s," Stalter says. "Remember when everything was free? You put it in, then you ask yourself how you're going to make money." His idea is eventually to flip Spokane's HotZone to a pay service. He will enlist local businesses to sell prepaid Internet-access cards to people wandering through...
Will people actually pay for wi-fi? Can Vivato pull money out of thin air? Maybe not with prepaid cards, but, as Stalter says, the technology is way ahead of the applications, and over time alternative revenue sources are going to come crawling out of the woodwork. I thought of one myself, when I got back from Spokane. Parking in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., is so tight, it took 45 minutes of circling the block before I found a space. I spent that time doing a thought experiment: What if Vivato lit up my neighborhood with wi-fi? Then...