Word: wirelessed
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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...
...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. If she sees a suspicious car at a stoplight, she can use the HotZone to run the suspect's plates and download arrest warrants, criminal records and affidavits to her squad...
That kind of 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...
...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 to be tempted to recoup the costs." Free wi-fi enthusiasts...
...SPOT Small city, big wireless dreams...