W I R E L E S S  S O C I E T Y
The City That Cut the Cord
Sleepy Spokane, Wash., has a secret: it's the wireless hot spot of the future
By Lev Grossman

October 11, 2004
I rolled into Spokane, Wash., around 6 p.m. on a Tuesday. Spokane is one of those sleepy cities bursting with small-town pride—its residents will be glad to inform you, for example, that it's the smallest city ever to be host of a World's Fair—but it's a pretty quiet place on a Tuesday night. You can look both ways before you cross the street if you really want to, but it's just a formality. I sat on a park bench. A dude on the corner played the saxophone. Some punks on dirt bikes made fun of me. The silence was eerie. Zombie-movie eerie.

	INVISIBLE LINK Whether you're keeping your home safe or watching movies by the pool, wires aren't required PHOTOS FROM SPOKANE Sleepy Spokane, Wash., has a secret: it's the wireless hot spot of the future
	Wi-Fi Gets Rolling The Web is going wireless in offices, schools, RV parks and more—transforming our lives like no technology since the Internet itself

But there's a lot more going on here than meets the eye. Spokane is actually a radical experiment in urban wireless technology, a live-in laboratory where city-employed nerds are crash-testing the wireless technotopia of the future. All of downtown Spokane, including the park that I was sitting in, is a massive wi-fi hot spot, a whole neighborhood enveloped in an invisible field of high-volume Internet access that covers

100 city blocks. The same way some libraries and coffeehouses offer wireless Internet access, all of downtown Spokane is a wireless surfing zone. If I'd had a laptop with a wi-fi card, or even a Web-enabled PDA or cell phone, I could have surfed the Web right from that park bench for free.

Sadly, I didn't. That would have shown up those dirt-bike punks.

Spokane is by no means the only project of its kind. It's easy to imagine that by the end of the decade most U.S. cities will exist beneath an invisible dome of wi-fi—"city clouds," in the jargon of the industry. Rio Rancho, N.M., has one, though not on the scale of Spokane's; ditto for Grand Haven, Mich. (see sidebar), as well as Lafayette, Louis and Cerritos in California. And bigger players are moving in all the time. Cook County, Ill., is planning a massive 940-sq.-mi. cloud that would light up all of Chicago. Philadelphia announced a humongous hot zone of its own in September. Los Angeles and New York City are soliciting bids from wireless contractors. This stuff is just too cheap and too useful not to have. It doesn't even stop at the city limits. Out in the sticks, where there are no skyscrapers to get in the way of a wi-fi signal, wireless is even bigger. There's a hot spot in rural Walla Walla County, Wash., that runs 3,700 sq. mi.

I was in Spokane to meet the people behind its audacious experiment, principally a guy named Don Stalter, ceo of Vivato, the high-tech start-up that supplies the technology to make it possible. Stalter didn't found the company; it began with a Hewlett-Packard engineer named Skip Crilly, who lived in the hills outside Spokane and couldn't get anybody to run a high-speed line to his house. Like any good engineer, he thought outside the box: maybe he could get the speed without the wiring. The standard wireless Internet technology, wi-fi, was cheap and fast, but it worked only at a range of about 300 ft. What if there was a way to boost that range?

In 1999, Crilly, working with another HP engineer named Bob Conley, figured out a way to run a regular wi-fi signal through a phased-array antenna, a powerful piece of hardware that's used mostly by the military. Suddenly, they had a wi-fi hot spot a couple of miles wide. The world had never seen that before. If a regular wi-fi transmitter was a candle, this thing was a baseball-stadium spotlight. They called it, for reasons best known to themselves, Little Joe.

All they had to do was figure out what to do with it. Hewlett-Packard wasn't interested in the project, so Crilly and Conley went out and started their own company. They raised around $65 million in venture capital, most of which they burned through pretty quickly. They sold a few hundred Little Joes, but not nearly as many as they needed to sell. Stalter came on board in October of last year. A fast-talking veteran of the high-tech scene, he specializes in taking over companies that have lost their way. Stalter's job: to figure out what Crilly and Conley's wi-fi spotlight was good for and who would pay good money for it.

The answer came from an unexpected direction. Every year Spokane plays host to Hoopfest, the world's largest three-on-three basketball tournament—another source of local pride. Hoopfest involves some 6,000 three-person teams from all over the world playing 25,000 games around the city. Scoring and scheduling are a nightmare of confused people scurrying about, carrying little slips of paper with numbers on them—exactly the kind of problem technology is supposed to eliminate. So somebody had the bright idea of sticking one of Vivato's prototype wi-fi transmitters on top of Spokane city hall and flooding a few blocks of downtown with wi-fi, thus allowing all the scoring to be done online. The setup was about as ugly a piece of jerry-built hackery as you're ever likely to see—the workers ended up bolting one of Vivato's phased-array antennas onto an extra Hoopfest backboard—but it worked perfectly. Downtown Spokane was suddenly blessed with wireless goodness, and the tournament went off without a hitch, all those pesky little slips of paper having been replaced by sleek wireless PDAs.

And then everyone promptly forgot about the whole thing.

Well, almost everyone. It was the city's computer gnomes who first noticed that people were still using that Vivato antenna. Because the city never turned it off, it was still up there, pumping out free wireless Internet, and people were logging on. "All the time we're watching, there were always 10 to 15 people on the network," says Garvin Brakel, director of management information services for the city of Spokane. "It was unadvertised, unknown, but people were finding it regardless."

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