Urbana gets hook up

By Erin Scottberg

This is part three of a three-day series on citywide Internet access developing in Urbana.

The installation of a node on the Urbana Free Library marked the second of 20- to 25- city-funded nodes to be placed around downtown Urbana and integrated into CUWiN’s existing wireless network to bring intranet and Internet connectivity to users. For now, the city is working on the downtown areas and has no plans to blanket the entire town with a wireless network.

For some community members, the process of getting Urbana involved with the CUWiN project has been disappointing.

“We could have been one of the first mesh networks in the country,” said Danielle Chynoweth, a member of the Urbana City Council. “I think the city has gone way too slow getting this network out. Way, way too slow.”

Chynoweth said that when she first introduced the idea to the city in 2002, she had some deployment issues with the former mayor, who told her the downtown branch of the network would be up by July of 2004. A year and a half later only two city-funded nodes are up.

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“That is not acceptable to me,” she said.

Although Chynoweth feels like Urbana missed its chance to be one of the first cities to deploy cutting-edge technology, she does think that the city is finally beginning to give the network the attention it deserves.

Bill DeJarnette, Urbana’s information services manager, is also disappointed with the project’s slow progression, but says that it’s now on his list of priorities. Two years ago, he said, networking hardware was changing so fast that it wasn’t a good time to buy mass quantities of hardware because it would have needed to have been replaced very quickly.

“By taking more time, the prices have gone down dramatically,” DeJarnette said. “I’m going to get a lot more bang for my 18,000 dollar buck.”

DeJarnette said most of the city’s nodes will be up and networked through the downtown by June, possibly May.

“Needless to say, we will go as fast as we can to do it right,” DeJarnette said.

He then explained that until recently, the city depended largely on the knowledge of CUWiN staff members to do much of the technical work, which proved to be the slowest way to move since CUWiN had a small staff and lot of projects. Now, DeJarnette said, his in-house staff, which has stayed the same size throughout the project, has the skills and the training to do the majority of the work themselves. The brunt of the workload has shifted from CUWiN’s shoulders to the city’s, which means less people to coordinate and speedier deployment to DeJarnette.

Had Urbana moved on Meinrath’s first proposal to join the network in 2001, the city could have been one of the first in the nation to deploy a wireless mesh network. If the city does choose to blanket the whole town, they could be one of the first to deploy an open source municipal network. It’s a possibility, Meinrath said, but a slim one.

Lori Patterson, president of OJC Technologies and vice president of the Urbana Business Association wants to see the downtown branch completed so the city can begin to work on expanding the network to other areas. She said she is sure that once the network is up and widely-used, people are going to realize that broadband connectivity is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.

Although some claim telecommunication companies have not been very accepting of municipal wireless networks, Art Svymbersky, the customer service manager for the Champaign-Urbana division of Insight Communications, thinks having free Internet access downtown is going to bring Insight more broadband-cable customers.

Svymbersky said that Insight feels no threat from CUWiN. If anything, it’s going to enhance Insight’s business because people who are going online for the first time with the CUWiN network are going to want a home connection to do heavier surfing for more downloading, more uploading, and more bandwidth.

“It’s going to be a great convenience,” Svymbersky said. “I think that people who use it will love it. They can sit outside, drink their coffee at the caf‚, get on and do light work. I think most customers will then still want to have some type of home service.”

This is how the public and private sides of broadband should cooperate, Meinrath said. Considering that the CUWiN network currently comes with no service guarantee and is best-suited for light work, not the heavy downloading that many users are prone to, it is best viewed as a compliment to an at-home Internet service provider, not a replacement.

Svymbersky also said that if Insight subscribers want to share their bandwidth with the CUWiN network, Insight isn’t going to stop them unless they see other customers’ Internet connection hurting as a result of one user eating up an exorbitant amount of bandwidth.

“They need to be under our acceptable use policy,” Svymbersky said. “That basically says Insight really doesn’t care too much what you do, but when it starts affecting the performance of other customers, then we do have the right to step in.”

At that point, Svymbersky said that Insight would alert a customer that they are exceeding acceptable use, and if that practice continues, the account could be limited or canceled.

The city looks at providing wireless access downtown as a community service.

“My goals are not to replace a business’s Internet service within their building,” DeJarnette said. “My goal is to enhance the environment of the city.”

DeJarnette dismissed criticism toward the city’s slow deployment of the network.

“Is Urbana on the cutting edge?” he asked. “No. You know why they call it the cutting edge? You bleed money profusely. That’s why it’s called cutting.”

Within the next six months, Meinrath hopes to see all of downtown Urbana under the CUWiN umbrella. Last Wednesday, version .06 of the CUWiN software was released and Meinrath said it is substantially improved in terms of stability and scalability. The city is finalizing ways to install nodes on light poles around town, some of which will act dually as a network node and access point. More people are learning about the project as funding continues to trickle in.

“In essence, every user at the Urbana Free Library, every user on the network, is helping build the world’s foremost open source technology,” Meinrath said. “The most important thing is that the public know they’re taking part in testing this new technology.”