Word: wi
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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...
...tend to think of information as a liquid; we talk about how it flows through conduits--wires and cables--or gathers in pools in hard drives. But wi-fi turns information into an all-encompassing vapor that seeps into places it has never been before, and it has added an extra dimension to sleepy old Spokane. Elise Robertson is a 10-year veteran of the city's police force. Her squad car has a full-fledged wireless PC in it--the guts of it are in her glove compartment--with a touch-screen monitor stuck on her dashboard...
Next come the parking meters. Soon, a parking attendant who writes you a ticket in Spokane will also be able to run your plates to see whether your car is hot. And when your time runs out, the fancy wi-fi-enabled parking meters will be smart enough to page a meter cop, so you will get all the parking tickets you deserve. Who knows, one day the meter could also be programmed to page your house to warn you that you're about to get a ticket--or to let your spouse know that you're parked in front...
...stuff makes you realize that life in the wireless city of the future isn't necessarily unmitigated bliss. Information is a two-edged sword: it can empower you, but it can also mess with 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...
...every city cloud passes the cost along to the consumer. In Austin, Texas, local businesses maintain 84 free wi-fi hot spots networked together, and the companies split the cost between them; in theory, they make the money back by attracting bandwidth-hungry customers. "I like the idea of the technology," Richard Mackinnon, president of the Austin Wireless City Project, says of Spokane's HotZone. "The problem is more with the finances behind it. When you have the Zone, you're reduced to a single player: one big person has to pay for everything. That person is going...