Word: wirelessed
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...with a Hewlett-Packard engineer named Skip Crilly, who lived in the hills outside Spokane and couldn't get anybody to run a high-speed line to his house. Like any good engineer, he thought outside the box: maybe he could get the speed without the wiring. The standard wireless Internet technology, wi-fi, was cheap and fast, but it worked only at a range of about 300 ft. What if there was a way to boost that range...
...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--but it worked perfectly. Downtown Spokane was suddenly blessed with wireless goodness, and the tournament went off without a hitch, all those pesky little slips of paper having been replaced by sleek wireless PDAs...
Well, almost everyone. It was the city's computer gnomes who first noticed that people were still using that Vivato antenna. Because the city never turned it off, it was still up there, pumping out free wireless Internet, and people were logging on. "All the time we're watching, there were always 10 to 15 people on the network," says Garvin Brakel, director of management information services for the city of Spokane. "It was unadvertised, unknown, but people were finding it regardless...
That started those computer gnomes thinking. City employees--police, fire fighters, meter cops and others--tend to roam around a lot. They need information, but they can't be bogged down with wires and cables. Maybe a huge zone of wireless Internet access could be part of the city's infrastructure...
...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 group called the Downtown Spokane Partnership got together and created the Spokane HotZone...