I saw today George Nemeth linked on Brewed Fresh Daily my article on Cleveland Hieghts WiFi strategy, and he has an great other suggested link to the MuniWireless site that suggests the new Democratic leadership has "plans to push legislation that will allow munis to have a “role to play where commercial operators don’t see an opportunity.”"A good example where I see the greatest need is East Cleveland.

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This afternoon, I did a test of Wifi networks in the neighborhoods where Case is paying OneCleveland to install community WiFi - I parked my can in over a dozen locations and searched for wifi networks and then attempted to connect with networks that were not encrypted. What I found is there is a high saturation of existing hotspots - a very dense wifi cloud is already in place throughout Cleveland Heights. In the commercial/residential areas, there are often dozens of hotspots. Most are encrypted and secured, but in every location I tried in the areas I understand OneCleveland is adding a wifi network I could find an open wifi hotspot and get online.

I made some other interesting observations. Many of the businesses on Coventry have visible wifi networks but do not make them open to the public - examples include Big Fun and Panini's. There are few free and open wifi hotspots clearly associated with businesses in Cleveland Heights - there is Caribu and I believe PBandJ may be Tommy's, but few businesses in Cleveland Heights are showing any business interest to provide WiFi to their customers and the public, raising the question why Case and the city government should be inclined to do that for them.

As you stray off Coventry into the areas I believe are most heavily populated by Case students - around all the Zipkin and Montlack multi-units on Hampshire and Lancashire, for example - the number of wifi hotspots skyrockets, but there are fewer networks open to the public - they do not share with others, raising the question why the public should in any way subsidize them with redundant free access.

If half the wealthy multiunit building owners in these neighborhoods would spend $20/month for a broadband connection and provide an open wifi signal in each building, there would be a complete free cloud in those neighborhoods, at no expense to the public, city, Case, or the tenants.

Where there seem to be more homeowners, there seem to be a higher percentages of open networks, indicating more of these residents are unsophisticated about securing their networks or more inclined to share. As Cleveland Heights has many progressive home-owning residents, it is likely they like to share.

Based on the high residential and commercial density and existence of a very dense free market WiFi cloud already in place in Cleveland Heights, it would be much easier and more cost effective and sustainable to leverage existing excess capacity rather than build a redundant network that competes with the existing commercial providers. Consider, of all the WiFi and broadband in place in Cleveland Heights, perhaps 5% is in use at any one time... probably less than 1%.

Rather than having Case and Cleveland Heights pay to replace what exists in the free market, community leaders should encourage businesses and residents there to add more broadband connections and wifi access points to their broadband connections (thus participating in the free market) and open up more of their wifi hot spots to neighbors (thus participating in building community capacity). For example, every business and most residences on and around Coventry and Cedar already have broadband so they should all be encouraged to have a wifi router and allow public access to some portion of their wireless broadband signal.

This architecture could be optimized with a contained portal strategy that allows properly configured wifi hotspot owners to segment their bandwidth into private and public channels and direct all public access to an authentication server, making access secure, and that could then direct all registered (but still free) users to a portal promoting Cleveland Heights community news, businesses and rental opportunities (and portal sponsors could pay for the overhead for that), all using free software and low cost hardware and without overlaying new infrastructure. An interesting example of how this approach is sweeping the globe is found at http://en.fon.com/

To take such a model to a higher level, the community could develop a grass-roots mesh environment, like being deployed in Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) - see http://www.cuwireless.net/

For East Cleveland, a community neglected by carriers and the greater regional community, we are planning to use both strategies to build a wireless community broadband network where there is none today, and no corporate charity to build a much needed technology infrastructure to meet the needs of the underserved and impoverished residents there. I'll be conducting a similar analysis of the state of WiFi availability in East Cleveland over the next few days.

Regarding the Case University Technology fee, there is some interesting debate about this on the Graduate Student Senate (GSS) WIKI. Grad students do not approve of the fee and want it defrayed, for many reasons including they were not asked for input and have no say in how the funds will be spent. More insight is found on all this in a WIKI posting about a meeting about the fee where high level Case Officials explained their cause to the Graduate Student Senate, which brings to question justification for Case spending this money for technology upgrades for Cleveland Heights. Note, in the 2007/2008 school year, the fee will raise about $1,829,625 from undergraduate students, being assessed $425 next school year (2006 undergrad enrollment of 4,305) and about $1,124,400 from graduate and professional students, being assessed $200 next school year (2006 graduate and professional enrollment of 5,622), representing increased technology fee collection of about $3,000,000, so Case finds the need to assess students for a considerable amount of new internal funding to support their department.

The actual budget for ITS for the ’07 Fiscal Year (FY07) is $15.7M. It is divided as such:

Faculty Support ($0.3M; 2%)

Internet Access ($1.1M; 7%)

Software Licenses ($1.5M; 9%)

Call Center and Desktop Support ($1.9M; 12%)

Hardware, TEC Maintenance ($2.2M; 14%)

Salaries ($8.7M; 55%)

Additionally, ITS needs $2.3M per year for the next 4 years to pay for current professional service obligations.

The IT fee will support the implementation and maintenance of a new Student Information System (SIS) to replace the current one. This is the system that maintains student records and allows you to register for classes online, amongst other things. The money will also be used to pay for a “debt service,” which, as best I can tell, means paying interest on a loan that the university has already taken out for improving the SIS.

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I woulda thunk they would want to offer free access in the northern section of CH where property values are lower and where kids might use the access for home study. North Coventry, and the Noble Nela section of town that borders on East Cleveland, rather than in the high dollar top of the hill areas, where the houses that give CH a reputation of being a wealthy suburb are located.