http://news.com.com/2100-1033-918439.html
Wi-Fi in the Steel City
By Ben Charny
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
May 20, 2002, 4:45 PM PT
update A growing number of cities are setting up Wi-Fi access in public
outdoor areas
like parks for business districts.
The latest is Pittsburgh, where an outdoor public Wi-Fi network was launched
Monday. It is run
by 3 Rivers Connect, a nonprofit whose major source of funding is the state of
Pennsylvania.
Private wireless company Grok Technology is managing the network.
The network, which became available for public use on Monday, is free to use
for now.
Organizers envision charging $20 a month for access once the network, covering
a
4-square-mile area of downtown Pittsburgh, is built, according to Executive
Director Ron
Gdovic.
So far, the so-called Pittsburgh Public Wireless Internet (PPWI) project is
limited to two
downtown parks, Gdovic said. A pair of antennae on the eighth floor of a
downtown building are
showering the parks with 10-megabit Internet access, Gdovic said.
Pittsburgh joins the small, but growing, number of urban areas with public
Wi-Fi projects.
Officials in Jacksonville, Fla., and in Ashland, Ore., have created "wireless
zones" in shopping
areas and neighborhoods to allow people with wireless modems to access such
networks for
free.
Pittsburgh is creating the network to show off its technological savvy and
attract new
businesses to move there, Gdovic said. "We're looking to help Pittsburgh...be
perceived as a
wired city," he said. The city of Jacksonville created a wireless network to
drum up foot traffic
in an area of shops the city wants to revitalize, city officials said.
Wireless local area networks, or WLANs, let anyone with a laptop and a modem
get wireless
Internet access from up to 300 feet away. Although wireless LANs operate
through the 802.11
standard, there is an alphabet soup of versions of 802.11 that have varying
levels of security or
speed.
For example, the wildly popular Wi-Fi networks operate on 802.11b, but 802.11a
and 802.11g
have been developed to be more secure or to travel on more channels. The
802.11b version
runs on three channels in the unregulated 2.4GHZ spectrum, which is also used
by cordless
phones, microwave ovens, and many Bluetooth products. Because the information
is
transmitted through the air, a person can "capture" the information as it
travels.
The 802.11a strain is an approved standard that broadcasts a more powerful
signal, running on
12 channels in the 5GHZ spectrum, and transfers data up to five times faster
than 802.11b.
There are only a very limited number of 802.11a networks, even though the
802.11a chipsets
have been sold for nearly a year. While it is faster, it has not been backward
compatible to
802.11b.
Another Wi-Fi standard, known as 802.11g, which is more secure than 802.11b
and has the
speed of 802.11a, is in the works as well, but it has yet to be approved by
the appropriate
standards bodies.
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