Portland leads the way for free Wi-Fi access

Wired on Friday Danny O'BrienI've come to Portland in America's postcard-scenic northwest, sampling perhaps one of its least scenic attractions: free wireless internet access.

From where I'm sitting in a downtown coffee house I can see two volcanos and four open Wi-Fi access points - the "hotspots" that enable those with suitably configured laptops to reach the internet without wires.

Portland is not a major US city. The whole area holds little more than a million people. It's hardly rural but, with San Francisco to the south and Seattle to the north, it's rarely the city people think of when they think of the technologically advanced west coast: although it holds Intel's headquarters and Fujitsu factories.

What it is known for is the scale and success of its civic endeavours. The city's planners are lauded for their successful planning of mixed-use neighbourhoods and integrated public transportation.

It's also home to the most free Wi-Fi networks per capita in the US.

That success is down to a volunteer group called Personal Telco. Inspired by London's consume.net, which first suggested the possibility of creating a communally run free internet from dozens of privately run hotspots, Personal Telco has been rolling out free Wi-Fi hotspots in Portland for five years.

Almost all major cities across Europe and the US have groups like Personal Telco; volunteer outfits trying to blanket their cities in free Wi-Fi for all.

Few get as far as Portland's, with more than 100 nodes on the Portland map, and more coming up all the time.

Portland has a natural fit for free net access. The northwest's culture of social but low-key coffee houses was a perfect launching pad for providing local wireless access. The hard part was persuading the coffee shops that it made sense to provide free internet access.

"It was a very hard sell three or four years ago," says Nigel Ballard, one of the Personal Telco founders. "Now they call me and say 'we're opening a coffee place in two weeks, can you give us Wi-Fi?'

"You'd have to be crazy to open a coffee house in Portland without free Wi-Fi. People will just walk two more blocks to get to one that has it."

Ballard can't explain why Personal Telco is succeeding where so many have petered out. Part of it is probably the character of Portland, with its tradition of civic awareness among its citizens. But Ballard gives a hint as to what sets Personal Telco apart from similar efforts.

Each Personal Telco node has its own local web server - a private sandbox of web content that anyone connecting to the node can add to.

It's something Ballard himself has little use for. "I want to provide access, not content."

But when he is asked how decisions were made about the node's local websites, he waves the question away.

"I didn't want it, so I'm not involved in it. If people want to do something, they can just go off and do it."

This ad-hoc approach, where an interested techie can just pursue their interests in a largely free-wheeling environment may account for the vitality of the group.

However, neither Ballard nor many of his colleagues at Personal Telco have managed to achieve one of their original goals - bridging the digital divide between the rich and poor in the city with free access to information.

That's partly because the coffee houses and downtown areas serve the middle and upper classes but mainly it is because it's hard to put computers of any kind, let alone modern Wi-Fi-enabled laptops, into the hands of Portlanders struggling to pay basic bills.

And that's where Portland's other main voluntary tech group, Free Geek, comes in. Free Geek builds computers out of donated scrapped systems and gives them to people that can't normally afford them.

One of its schemes allows people to build several computers and take the last one home themselves, loaded with free open-source software for word processing and net access - ideal for the practical kind of access people can use to improve their lives.

Ballard's excited about co-operating more with Free Geek, bringing access to the machines and the areas that need them most.

Portland, like everywhere, has its struggling neighbourhoods. That area is the north end - with the lion's share of recent immigrants and minorities.

This makes north Portland a prime target for Ballard and Personal Telco. With a $15,000 (€11,670) grant recently given by the Meyer Memorial Fund, the volunteers are planning to light a commercial street in north Portland with free Wi-Fi.

However, it's still hard to reach certain people with the information and training they would need to get the most out of an internet connection.

Still, Ballard talks enthusiastically about how he's seen the Wi-Fi in use. One man new to Portland used a Wi-Fi hotspot Ballard installed in a hostel to find work and a place to live.

A homeless man uses power points fitted to light Christmas trees in local parks to charge an old Toshiba laptop. He uses the Personal Telco hotspots around the park to reach the net and live a little better.

It's not the scenario that Ballard imagined when he began. It's not a goal that any more carefully planned and centrally funded municipal endeavour might aim for. But it's what happens here and there's no one to tell the volunteer geeks of Portland that that's not a social and technological success.