How is it good?

A couple of months ago, a friend asked a series of questions about Grand Rapids’ proposed municipal wireless.  He sent me a few links.  I read them, and thought for a bit, and here’s what I wrote back to him–lightly edited.  It’s not so much about what Grand Rapids is actually doing, as it is about why anyone would want to try to do what Grand Rapids might be trying to do.  It’s long, so watch out.

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Scott,

 

Let me see if I’ve got the questions and concerns down:

 

 

• Municipal wireless networks might be a boondoggle, like a monorail (which is the word I’ll be using as shorthand for that sort of thing).

• When originally proposed, it was pitched as free.

• The police are going to use the network (is there a concern that this will limit private access, but otherwise, I don’t fully realize what they’re doing).

• You expressed an enthusiasm for the portable communications technology. You called it the best compass there ever was.

• Of what does the relationship between communications and technology consist?

• Can/how can a local communications network strengthen a local community and economy?

• Can a mediated communications model be good for society and/or culture?

 

 

What I see here is a couple of general questions: can a municipal wireless communications be made to work for the public good? And what is the public good anyway, and how does it relate to methods of communication?

 

 

Municipal wireless networks are a strange sort of thing, and we live in a strange sort of time. I’ll be working this through by a handful of analogies: traditional infrastructure (like roads and water pipes), and other communications systems. Here’s the short of it. Municipal wireless communications networks probably will be workable, and they probably will be good for local development (both social and economic). But, people being people, there will be problems and failures to live up to potentials. 

 

 

Is city-wide high-speed internet access a good thing? First, the glib reply to get it out of the way: it’s a very good thing for vendors of hardware, and it’s a pretty good thing for sellers of bandwidth and spectrum; it’s a potentially very useful thing for the business of a city (public safety, and other in-field data transmissions), though from that point of view it’s still a very good thing for vendors. Is it a good thing for every-day citizens? Let’s focus on small business owners and moderate to low income residents, since I feel this is who you’re talking about. (By the way, moderate and low income are technical terms. The income levels for these terms vary by county, and are set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.)

 

 

Actually, I’d like to come back in a moment to why it’s not totally a glib reply.

 

 

First though, a few thoughts on the difference between critical infrastructure and monorails (shorthand for a certain type of public project). Local governments install critical infrastructure–roads are the classic example–because people need what the infrastructure provides. Sometimes, like with streetcars or other mass transit, the local government doesn’t go directly into the business. They might sell franchises allowing private firms to use public assets (the road right-of-way), or they might create a semiautonomous authority. Another type of critical infrastructure are utilities like electricity and water/sewer. One hundred years ago, municipal power was pretty common. Even today, the City of Grand Haven is served by a municipal power board. It’s attached to the grid, just like everything else, but you pay for power from a local public body running a local plant. In Michigan, water systems are publicly run–either locally or regionally. Financially, they’re run separately from the ordinary budget of the city (called the General Fund) by a tool called an Enterprise Fund, and they have to run their own surpluses. You can’t legally support a water distribution system through taxes. You support them through user fees which should be listed by type on your water bill–usually the commodity price (of the water itself) and the debt repayment (for putting the pipes in originally).

 

 

Monorails are things which look like critical infrastructure, but which don’t provide something people need.  (As I’m using the word, monorails are all sorts of public projects.  In some cities, for instance, building things like sports stadia to support the Olympics are monorail projects.)  They cost a ton to install, but can’t operate by generating enough fees to pay for themselves. Now, of course, roads don’t pay for themselves at all, but as a society we’ve come to agree that we’ll pay for roads through a variety of taxes; general fund, gas taxes, etc. Which is fine; we can make those sorts of social decisions, that’s why we have politics.  Some places have user fees–toll roads. Monorails don’t supply a fine enough grain of service delivery–roads, electric lines, water, and successful mass transit each go pretty much anywhere. Olympic natatoria pretty much don’t.  You usually have to walk between a little way and a couple of blocks to get to a mass transit site, which is why mass transit needs public subsidies in addition to user fees (bus lines are more flexible and less expensive than rail lines, which is why there are more of them). Roads are more heavily subsidized than mass transit, but socially, we’re a lot more excited about roads (individual autonomy, and because roads help define private property) than about mass transit (often perceived as used by faintly distasteful people who can’t/won’t drive cars).

 

 

So, is city-wide wireless internet service a monorail or is it critical infrastructure? Most critical infrastructure is capital investment–roads, pipes, utility poles, wires, buses, trains. As you know, network hardware–especially when it’s out in the open–lasts for a while, but not nearly as long as traditional infrastructure elements. Does computer hardware or do networks last 5 to 20 years? Probably not. Even if one is made from robust workhorse components (dot matrix printers, 2400 baud modems), the increased capabilities we expect from networks over time outstrip their capacity, often well within their potential service lifetimes. How many people have ever dialed into the Internet on a 2400 baud modem?  I did, about 12 years ago.  Now, even though you can, you would be hard-pressed to find anything you could access in a useful length of time.  Why, it would take hours to load even this web page.  The need for constant replacement of property in the open, and for regular investment in new, faster, more-throughput gear feels like something other than critical infrastructure to me.

 

 

But, like critical infrastructure, wireless goes everywhere, which may be more important.  After all, a lot of delivery networks have components in the open. Wireless can provide a very, very fine grain of service delivery.  Also, municipalities often explain the need for city-wide wireless networks in terms of serving underserved communities. (This is why cable television companies go into neighborhoods where they might not make as much profit as they’d like. In order to get the franchise to use public infrastructure to run their lines (utility poles or road right-of-way for underground wires), they have to agree to go everywhere–to serve the underserved.) Another way to explain the need for these networks is to tie them to public safety, health, and efficient delivery of public service.

 

 

Generally, I roll my eyes when people start talking about how the internet is different from everything else, and how it’s going to change everything. However, as a municipal public service, it does seem to be different from a lot of other things, so, in thinking about this, I want to back up to purposes rather than dwell too much on the hardware aspect.

 

 

If we agree it’s a public purpose, then we’ll find a way to make it work. Probably. This has up sides and down sides, and helps explain why it seems to take so long to install.  So far the technology isn’t robust enough to solve the property in the open/delivery grain equation.  It’s getting close, which we can tell because some communities have installed it already.  WiMax seems to hold the potential for really delivering.  We’ll see.  The point is that the technology evolves so fast that the answer to making it work is probably going to be developed within just a few years from now.  Which, honestly, is within about 20 years of the internet going from University and military use to household uses.  Enthusiasm, which is natural, generated by the speed of development of this technology can turn pretty quickly to frustration when municipalities hesitate to deploy it.  But the comparison here might be to the difference between having an AS/400 with some dumb terminals but then not deploying Windows workstations to every cubicle for years.  If you get a certain technology early, you may not be able to afford the more flexible technology later–or adapt your processes to the new technology.

 

 

So why, really, do we want wireless internet as a public service? It’s actually difficult to say. We have never, as a society, decided that communications technology demands public operations. There are (to my knowledge) no municipally operated phone companies nor (to my knowledge) CATV companies. There have been some municipal broadcast stations, but not many. We require commercial communications firms to serve underserved communities. In addition to CATV franchise requirements, telephone bills still have a federal Universal Service Fee for rural wires. It used to be that there were pay phones everywhere. This was, in part, to make sure everyone had access to a phone when they needed one. In part is was a business decision, which is why they’re going away (because people have all sorts of access to phones now).

 

 

Social justice and the free rider problem are two things discussed in every class I took for my MPA. We have to make sure people (those who can’t afford) get full benefit of public investment at a fair price (whatever fair means), and make sure that if people (who can afford) can use something that they pay a fair price, both to support its continued operation and to make it available to those who can’t afford it. There are a few public water drinking fountains in the world, otherwise we even pay for water. We pay for water. I’m not aware of any breaks in water rates for low to moderate income people (note that renters don’t usually pay for water directly-but when landlords pay for water they have to cover the cost of it in the rents they charge).

 

 

In order for a public wireless network to function, a lot of people have to pay for it. Which is another way of saying that a lot of people have to use it, and be willing to pay. They’ll pay through taxes, or through user fees, or both. Volume of use is one distinction between monorail and critical infrastructure; perception of acceptable self-funding levels is another. It seems reasonable to look for a way to let low and moderate income people pay less than market rates for public wireless network use. Natural gas and electricity utilities do something like this. Roads, water, natural gas, and electricity are tied to public health matters such as congestion, filth, and warmth. Communications are related to public health and safety (which is, I presume, why GR wants to connect police cars to the proposed wireless network), but they’re not really on the same level as safe drinking water. I can see how high-speed communications can help the police mission on a case-by-case basis (the SWAT example in the link you provided, maybe downloadable search warrants, and pictures to confirm identities to name a few), but I’d expect that most of the time ordinary radio communications is sufficient to most police matters.

 

 

The essential argument in favor of municipal wireless networks is “to be a modern city, we need this.” On the one hand, that’s an argument like ”if all your friends were jumping off a bridge…”  On the other hand, it’s not exactly a bad argument, since it’s pretty much the same argument made for electricity about 100 years ago (and for gas lighting franchises, starting almost 200 years ago). There were hardly any uses for electricity 100 years ago, but now one doesn’t even think about cities without electric service. Again, communications technologies are different from electricity (and water, natural gas, and transportation), and here–finally–is where the difference lies, and where the rub is. I’d like to work this out more clearly, but communications technologies deliver something which is optional in a different way than the way electricity is optional. Communications content is a commodity, and so is electricity. But the commodity value of content is preferential, where the commodity value of electricity is assumed. I might choose Lifetime over Fox, or weather.com over the Drudge Report or not to watch TV or not use the internet, but there is only one kind of electricity (leaving aside the method of generation–which is a whole different conversation).  Furthermore, I would never think that lack of access to electricity was an option (except in limited circumstances like camping, or in thought experiments like this one). But electricity did used to be something people had to choose; just like now there are places (I expect that, even in the United States, some are within 15 miles of where you are right now) where people have the option to choose to connect to water or sewer lines.

 

 

It may be that within a generation the question of municipal wireless communications will be, like city-wide electricity supplies, a no-brainer. Right now it’s looking that way. The fact that right now we don’t know to what uses the network will be put doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. There weren’t very many uses for electricity 100 years ago, and there are a lot more now than there were even a generation ago.

 

 

Based on the links I read, GR seems to be taking something like a CATV model: let a firm use public utility poles (or water towers, or tall buildings or whatever) in trade for police access to the network, make anyone who wants to use it pay a market rate, but make sure low and moderate income people can access it at a reduced rate (or, like with pay phones, on a per-use rather than subscription rate). Incidentally, Philadelphia seems to be using a different model, an economic development model where an authority (like a DDA or a transit authority–like the Rapid) takes care of things. Again, this is similar to water and sewer enterprise funds, where the rates (or rates plus advertising) will have to carry the whole expense and run its own surplus. 

 

 

The heart of your questions, though, was how does community survive with so much mediation, and can municipal wireless networks (however they’re deployed–city department, public enterprise fund, semi-public authority, private firms using public assets through franchise agreements, or strictly private provision) help? Can a mediating technology more tightly knit a community together? (Let’s leave aside, for this discussion, the idea of on-line community, and focus on the human community placed in a local geography using a many-to-many communications network, since I feel that’s your focus in your e-mail.)

 

 

You asked about WalMarts, Amazons, YouTube, etc. A wireless municipal network won’t help local communities prevail against the tendency of corporations to standardize, since all such a network can be is communications pipes. This tendency, and concerns about it, go back at least as far as the founding of this country. These large corporations have their own communications networks, which a local environment can parallel (and potentially even connect to); but what the local environment cannot provide public access to are the analysis tools these corporations use (nor even equivalent tools–at least not directly through the local government, business groups can provide such things, generally on a membership basis like a Chamber of Commerce–and even then it’s still a bunch of individual small actors using the tool, rather than a large unified actor).

 

Local environments, even when agents cooperate, are Adam Smithian invisible hand environments. Corporations, when acting externally, are competitive agents in such a Smithian environment and are out to maximize profit; internally, though, they’re more like dictatorships with a hint of socialism thrown in to make sure employees are both contributing fully, and feel like they’re getting fair payment. Let’s consider an example we both know and love: Schuler.

 

With 5 stores, and a web site, Schuler is a corporation. If we split all the employees of Schuler into, say, 30 small bookstores and cafes, those 30 establishments couldn’t do what Schuler does economically. Could they be run profitably? Maybe. But they wouldn’t be coordinated. Would they be important in their neighborhoods? Probably. Schuler can do what it does because the owners direct the company, and the staff do what they tell them to. And because of the communications network they’re a part of, and which they piggyback on. Its unity on a large scale permits it to act in ways 30 different stores employing the same number of people, with the same number of square feet, carrying the same number of titles, the same number of copies, serving the same menu, and on and on could not act. Not even with sophisticated communications tools. They couldn’t aggregate the marginal resources to take advantage of (or create) the opportunities that a unified actor with the same aggregate resources can. They might be able to form a cooperative body, but that’s one more actor in the community, and not the same as a unified actor with the same total resources. Communities will rarely, and should not make it a mission to, be able to act in such a unified way.

 

 

I’m getting away from the essential question you asked about the wisdom of municipal wireless networks. But I think this stuff about the nature of municipal infrastructure, and the working of community might help with it all, and I’m getting us very close to my answers to your questions. A couple of underlying assumptions of free-market economics is that agents have equal access to information, and that they make rational decisions. Municipal wireless communications opens the world of information at least a little bit wider to everyone (everyone who has the hardware to connect, and the means to pay their fair share). This is good. There you go. A straight answer to one of your explicit questions.

 

 

Access to information is good for the grassroots activist and for the small business owner (who is often also a grassroots activist, but with a commercial agenda). Access to a two-way, fine-grained communications network is also good. People can use the network to have communications largely equivalent to conversations, meetings, rallies, news letters, TV, radio, etc. This is, in the abstract, good for a community. The challenge is to turn that communications opportunity into action–actually go out in your geography and do something. Shop locally, walk around the corner and see if the park is OK, and hang out there for a while to make sure. Don’t just get notice of Planning Commission meetings on your cell phone; write a short letter to the PC about a matter you’re concerned about, or even go to the meeting. This challenge is not one which can be addressed through systems development; since the challenge is to develop civic mindedness and citizen habits. This is a challenge each generation faces; such habits are acquired and maintained only if people (as individuals) believe they will benefit; the presence or absence of a particular communications network is secondary (at best) to a positive experience of the process or, better still, successes in having their view prevail.

 

 

Remember, for all the amazing things the internet does, communications networks have always been around. The American Revolution was fought in broadsides before the shooting started at Lexington and Concord. Edward R. Murrow used television to address McCarthyism. Conservatives used short mimeographed newsletters for decades. The tools of organizing aren’t what make the organizing work; it’s the message and the belief that organizing will get you somewhere.

 

 

There’s a crucial issue I’ve skirted around because I suspect you have more expertise with it than I have. The actual process of access–let’s assume the network is built and functioning, and that access is actually available at no direct cost to the user. The user still needs a device of some sort to access the network. Since the appeal of a wireless network is that it’s available everywhere, all the time, to everybody, this seems like it has to be a personal and portable device. Kiosks won’t cut it. Anyway, the current network deployment model offers kiosks in most public libraries–and they present the same difficulties any kiosk model will have: monitoring to prevent damage or theft and hours of operation (tied, in part, to the labor cost of monitoring) to name just two. If we’re going to supply kiosks, we might be better off beefing up the library system; many of these now offer wireless access in addition to the banks of computers, and ethernet jacks.  Libraries can offer WiFi, WiMAX or any other wireless standard as easily as any municipal system, and access can be controlled by requiring a library card to log into the system. Library cards are generally free to residents of the service district, paid for by property taxes in the service district, and there can even be access compacts between districts similar to interlibrary loan. It’s nice idea, but different than what we’ve been talking about. In order for a municipal system to work, people have to carry the access devices around with them.  (I’m not sure it’s the best compass that ever was, though. You don’t need a Compass Service Provider. )

 

 

There are two problems with these devices. They ain’t cheap, and once you own it you’re stuck with the capabilities is has, even though, as mentioned above, network capabilities will be changing. Even if the firmware can be upgraded, there are limits to how many upgrades will be possible. How long will WiMAX be around? It’s difficult to say, it seems to be about ready for deployment, five year ago it was–if anything–vaporware.

 

 

From a social justice point of view, how should a network be deployed if the underserved can’t, on a very practical level, access it without significant up-front cash outlays? How much does a handheld device cost which can pick up a WiFi signal and allow web browsing with enough on-board memory for some cut and paste? This seems a reasonable minimum for this sort of device: gmail currently gives you more than 6000 MB of e-mail storage, with a limit of several MB per attachment. This gets me the opportunity to use the communications potential of the network, maybe not fully, but a whole lot of it. If I get one, maybe it costs a couple of hundred dollars, I’m stuck with it, and it’s useless if WiFi is abandoned.

 

 

Same with WiMAX, or whatever amazing use of spectrum comes after that. An interesting analogy here may be with the telephone network. I’ve previously mentioned that pay phones served a function, but now they’re increasingly rare. People get cell phones, and if you don’t have the means or desire for a service contract, you can buy a cash-and-carry cell phone just about anywhere–gas stations, pharmacies, I know of a music store in Muskegon Heights. My wife has one. Here’s the analogy, in case you haven’t seen it coming: pay phones are like kiosks for the telephone network, they’re literally built like safes so they don’t really need monitoring. Cell phones are pretty high-tech deals, but are now a disposable item. There’s no reason a basic WiFi receiver with a basic OS, some flash memory, and a simple suite of software can’t hit the cash-and-carry disposable technology price point. I’m thinking $75, tops. I think the laptops for the third world project packs a ton more capability into a roughly $200 price point.

 

 

Maybe the WiFi device is out there, let me know. Same with WiMAX, once it’s available. So the social justice problem may be a simple chicken and egg problem: maybe the devices aren’t there at low cost because the network hasn’t been built yet. The cell phone network (and its manufacturing base) had to reach a certain level of maturity before the cash-and-carry disposable cell phone was available.

 

 

That’s from the end user’s point of view, though. And the device I’ve just described is probably vaporware. Back to the beginning of these thoughts, the network component vendors are there looking to make a profit, and the network provider (municipal, private, or somewhere in-between) needs an operating surplus to keep the network running and improving. If the question of who pays for the network installation and operation can be satisfactorily answered, then I think the rest of it will come together nicely.  Back to the library example above: it’s paid for by property owners within the service district. I expect most property owners don’t fully realize that they even pay library taxes, much less what they’re paying for. Here’s what’s likely to be the outcome: each community will have a huge struggle (political) to figure out what financial mechanism to use to pay for it, then it will run along virtually unnoticed for decades. If it’s a stable model, people will even stop noticing (like libraries); if it’s an unstable model then it’ll be in the news from time to time (like road commissions currently funded by a flat fee per gallon of gasoline). Even when it’s in the news, though, people won’t pay too much attention unless they’re directly inconvenienced.

 

 

But here’s the end of the discussion. I don’t think the system can be deployed at a no-cost to log-in price. It’s too expensive up front, and it requires constant maintenance (both hardware and people to keep the software going, plus some help desk support). There are almost no public services supplied at no-cost to the user at the time of use. Municipal swimming pools come to mind. Shuffleboard courts. Public drinking fountains and public toilets–but we don’t let people live at these places, so they aren’t substitutes for what people do pay for.  But the big ones, the ones that really make a city go, those cost. User fees like with water and sewer. Taxes like with roads. Building the system under public auspices is good; and the potential for helping really improve the community is there. It’s not a unique potential, though.

 

 

And it will only help improve a community—make it healthier and more interdependent—if people want to use it that way, and believe they can make a difference by using it to make a difference.

 

take care,

Shannon