If low-income residents can grab a brand-spanking-new free wireless signal anywhere on the streets of Philadelphia using laptops they probably don’t own, can’t afford and don’t know how to use, does it count as digital inclusion?
Last Wednesday night that question came up over and over again at a town hall-style forum at Temple on what the new management of Philly’s wireless network intends to do with it. The forum was organized by the Media Mobilizing Project and pulled in about 75 attendees.
On hand to respond to their concerns were Mark Rupp, the public face of the local investor group that bought the network early last week; Councilman Bill Green, who triggered the search for local ownership; and Greg Goldman, CEO of Wireless Philadelphia, which was created under the Street administration to accomplish the original project’s digital inclusion goals.
Under the new deal, Rupp said during an opening panel discussion, the network will provide free outdoor wireless access throughout the city, powered by revenue from sales of wired service to businesses, big institutions like schools and hospitals, and, Green hopes, city departments.
The investors are planning to build out the remaining 20 percent of the network EarthLink never finished, though Rupp stresses the new group won’t simply mimic EarthLink’s technical blueprint when choosing which hardware to use. The biggest difference is that while EarthLink’s model beamed wireless service into people’s homes (usually missing the mark), the new model isn’t aimed at residences at all.
“This is an outdoor network,” Rupp emphasized. He points out that one of the failures of EarthLink’s network was the difficulty of transmitting a wireless signal into homes through thick walls and tree-lined neighborhoods. “We’ve been studying this network and similar networks around the country for years, and we feel strongly that if we combine wired-line service with free outdoor wireless access, you would have something very robust.”
Green rattled off a list of uses for such a network. “Each year 1.4 million tourists visit the city,” he said. “They can use the network to make restaurant reservations, book theater tickets and read reviews.” He’s been pushing the city to consider signing on for a paid account, wirelessly connecting its police officers, firefighters, parking inspectors and myriad other city employees who work on the streets. “The city can save $5 to $10 million a year through this technology,” he said. Still, there’s no commitment from the city yet, and Green remarked that the new owners have “a tough fight” ahead of them to change that.
One of the community members who spoke after the panel was Hannah Sassaman, a media activist who helps build low-power community radio stations with the Prometheus Radio Project. Sassaman expressed concern that the new deal has turned its back on digital inclusion now that low-cost, indoor broadband access isn’t on the agenda.
“The efficiencies that come from tourists being able to make reservations at Le Bec-Fin pale in comparison to the efficiencies that come from an entire city of workers, families and communities getting online, accessing city documents, applying for college, finding health information and enjoying the ease of communication the rest of us get,” she said. “If it’s not coming from this network, then it’s the job of the city of Philadelphia to ensure everyone has access to a useful, reliable Internet connection within the next five years.”
Rupp says he believes in the importance of digital inclusion, but doing something about it isn’t a prime objective for him and his fellow investors. “Our role is to make the network available to the public for free. As for digital inclusion, the management and responsibilities of those programs must be addressed by Greg Goldman. That’s not what we’re about.”
Still, he says, residents can access the free outdoor signal if they’re creative. “People can get a signal at home by bringing their laptops or handheld devices onto their front stoops, or by bringing their computers close to a door or window, where the signal is stronger.”
The thought of, say, North Philadelphia school kids sitting out on the stoop with their homework and their laptops (if they have them) is an uneasy one, and a number of forum attendees said so during the question-and-answer session.
Green bristles at that. “Frankly, I was offended by the tone of last night’s meeting,” he says afterward. “This is a free service. If it’s free, it’s not that much of an inconvenience to take a free laptop you got through Wireless Philadelphia and take it to the front window.”
The new network agreement between Wireless Philadelphia and Rupp’s team is expected to be released within the next two weeks, and without it, it remains to be seen what Wireless Philadelphia’s (WP) role will be. It is known that WP will continue to draw revenue from the network’s operators, like it did from EarthLink. But a number of its biggest responsibilities have been stripped under the new business model.
One of WP’s main duties was helping people sign up for EarthLink’s low-cost home access, which no longer applies. Councilman Green says Wireless Philadelphia also has a much smaller role in providing oversight of the network than it did in the EarthLink days.
The Street administration touted digital inclusion as the core of its broadband ambitions, and Wireless Philadelphia is supposedly the vehicle to deliver that promise. Goldman, the organization’s CEO, has found himself on the defensive regarding Wireless Philadelphia’s performance numerous times since he came on board in 2006, and he struck a defensive note during last week’s panel.
“I hope people will recognize the position we’re in,” he says. “We’re a small company with a large mandate, and I think we’ve been doing a really good job and trying our hardest.”
Wireless Philadelphia can be considered small, with a budget of $1.38 million in the fiscal year 2006-2007 (the last period for which the organization’s public filings are available), and the organization lists just five employees on its website. At that size, the salaries of its top employees seem disproportionately high compared to similarly sized organizations in the nonprofit sector.
According a 2007 report of executive salaries compiled by the NonProfit Times, a national business publication about nonprofit management, the average salary of executive directors, CEOs and presidents of nonprofits with budgets of $1 to $10 million is $100,000. Goldman’s salary in fiscal year 2006-2007 was $155,000. According to the NonProfit Times report, that’s the average salary for heads of organizations 10 times the size of Wireless Philadelphia.
A December report released by the D.C.-based think tank New America Foundation says Wireless Philadelphia had an “aggressive plan to reach 2,800 recipients in its first year, 6,000 over three years.” The organization has fallen far short of this goal, providing free computers, training, broadband access and connection hardware to only about 1,200 low-income residents.
Goldman points out that Wireless Philadelphia was hampered by EarthLink’s failure to deliver the revenue it promised to Wireless Philadelphia, since far fewer customers signed up than EarthLink had expected.
Without that revenue, WP relied largely on fundraising to cover the cost of its Digital Inclusion program. Goldman says WP raised about $600 per program recipient, but the actual cost is somewhere between $800 and $1,000 per person.
Still, Goldman says there’s plenty of opportunity for Wireless Philadelphia under the new management. Since WP is no longer charged with helping people sign up for service, Goldman says it can focus more on distributing computers to low-income residents and training them. “We still have the challenge of providing hardware, training and tech support. With the free network we’re going to have a much more streamlined process,” he says.
As for what people are expected to do with their computers and training once they get them, now that low-cost, indoor, municipal broadband isn’t an option, Goldman thinks Wireless Philadelphia can help its Digital Inclusion recipients pull the signal inside with additional hardware like signal boosters.
Green agrees. “Wireless Philadelphia needs to redefine itself as a hardware provider,” he says. “They’re now in the business of giving equipment to people to help them connect to the network. They should change their name to ‘Connected Philadelphia.’”
Still, Goldman admits that devices like signal boosters won’t work for everyone. “I recognize that the network’s best use is for the outdoors,” he says.