Cyber Beach

 Miami Beach to launch long-delayed, free Wi-Fi this spring

By Charlotte Libov

Rachel Levy and Susana Perczek work on a business project at Spris restaurant on Lincoln Road. Photo by Richard M. Brooks

More than two years ago, the city of Miami Beach announced plans to install a citywide wireless network that residents and visitors could access for free — at least those below the second floor.

Now, with the project a year behind schedule and complaints from private Internet service providers mostly pacified, Miami Beach officials promise to unleash the long-awaited Wi-Fi system this spring.

First, however, the city and IBM — the company contracted to install the new system — need to make a number of upgrades to ensure that the service reaches Miami Beach’s entire 7.1-square-mile area, according to an independent engineering report provided to the city in late December.

“Wi-Fi brings us a huge public safety benefit, so we figured that, since we were doing that, we could extend the service citywide for residents, visitors and businesses,” Assistant City Manager Hilda Fernandez said. “We believe it’s a great amenity — we’ll have very, very high coverage so you can sit on Lincoln Road, you can use the beach walk and you can be connected.”

If it works, that is.

“We got sold an empty bag of goods,” said Richard Truocchio, president of Wireless Oceans, a wireless Internet service provider. “I found it appalling we [the city] went through it.”

IBM signed a $5.2 million contract with the city in February 2006 to design the system, install it and maintain it for six years. The company also agreed to provide a 24-hour help line in both English and Spanish, computers for city schools and discounts for Miami Beach residents to purchase computers at IBM employee prices.

However, since the contract only requires the service to reach as high as the second floor of each building in the city, customers living or working on higher floors will have to pay for wireless service. IBM agreed to provide a 25 percent discount on labor and materials for high-rise condos and hotels that want to boost the signal to higher floors.

IBM spokesperson Jenna Gable declined to comment and referred all inquiries back to Miami Beach officials.

Patricia Walker, the city’s chief financial officer who has been overseeing the project, would not specify when the new system will go online, but stressed that everything remains on track, even though building the infrastructure has taken longer than expected (initial deployment was slated for mid-2006).

Some adjustments were expected to ensure that the system meets the 95 percent outdoor and 70 percent indoor coverage contract specifications “because of the amount of foliage and construction” in the city, Walker said.

For the service to reach the entire area, Wi-Fi nodes must be mounted to streetlights or similar structures to receive and transmit wireless signals throughout the city. However, since the city of Miami Beach only controls one-third of the poles needed, it had to negotiate with both Florida Power and Light and the Florida Department of Transportation to use their existing poles for the project and retrofit them with photocell devices that can provide power to the system 24 hours a day, rather than merely at night.

Now, according to the engineering study by Jim Geier, of Wireless Nets, Ltd., the city must install even more nodes than originally planned. Miami Beach City Manager Jorge Gonzalez said that could take a few more months.

Despite the delays, Fernandez said, it’s amazing the project is still under way, given the status of other projects nationwide. Several cities, including Houston, San Francisco, Chicago, Cincinnati and Springfield, Ill., have recently delayed or jettisoned similar plans because they were too complicated or expensive.

“Fortunately, we were able to get in on the action long enough ago so we could negotiate a good deal with IBM,” Fernandez said.

Still, the plan hasn’t garnered much excitement among local businesses.

Private high-speed Internet providers throughout the city voiced opposition to the plan when it was first unveiled in 2005. Although some companies have since made peace with it, others are concerned that the free service will eat into their profits or that it just won’t work.

For example, AT&T Florida spokesman Don Sadler had opposed using public funds for such a project when the company was Bellsouth. But the company changed its viewpoint after the merger because the city of Miami Beach is an AT&T customer.

“We wish the city of Miami Beach well,” Sadler said. “There will still be a market for AT&T wireless services. There’s a lot of competition. Free is great, but if free doesn’t work, you get what you pay for.”

T-Mobile, which provides wireless services to Starbucks and other Miami Beach businesses, agreed.

“Municipal and free Wi-Fi is great for the industry,” a T-Mobile spokesperson said, adding that free and paid services can coexist because her company, for example, markets to those who want secure wireless service. “This is fundamentally the same reason bottled water is one of the best-selling consumer products in the world — it’s safe, dependable and you can take it with you.”

City officials have even warned that it would be unwise to transact confidential business over the open network.

Truocchio isn’t worried about it disrupting his business because he doesn’t think it will work.

“The system, as designed, will never work to the specifications in the Miami Beach RFP [request for proposal],” Truocchio said. “Therefore, if it ever does turn on, it will be a failure from the start.”

Truocchio said he has installed more than 20 nodes around a single building to ensure that it receives 95 percent wireless coverage. The city’s plan, however, calls for installing only 35 nodes per square mile. “The radio frequency physics do not allow for that kind of coverage for that kind of system,” he said.

Still, some residents are looking forward to the service.

“I think that’s always good provided that there is security,” said Dee M., a special events promoter.

Bartender Radost Palova and makeup artist Rob Scheppy, both high-rise dwellers, were excited about the new Wi-Fi service — until they were informed that it would not reach above the second floor.

“If they get to the second floor, why not everyone else?” Scheppy asked. “Guess they want to fill up the lobbies or just fill up the first-floor apartments.”

With free wireless, he said with a laugh, “they can sell the first-floor apartments at the same price as the penthouses.”

 For more information, visit http://web.miamibeachfl.gov/wifi/.

— Erik Bojnansky and Ben Torter contributed to this story.

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