WHITE PAPERS AND ARTICLES

WIRELESS HOTSPOTS DOT THE REGION
Article appeared in Grand Rapids Business Journal Express on May 24, 2004
Written by Daniel Schoonmaker

Grand Rapids — In December Steelcase Inc. celebrated the grand opening of its new 10,700-square-foot showroom in San Francisco.

Using Intel Corp.’s Wireless Verification program, the showroom is also a so-called wireless hotspot, designed to support user-centered research findings on how a work environment can enhance innovation, communication, work, learning and decision-making.

"Workers are often restricted in the office because they are tethered to hard-wired company networks and the Internet," explained Rick Yeates, Steelcase senior vice president of sales. "By Incorporating Wireless technology into the physical environment, employees can gather in group or team spaces or in private, more contemplative spaces without losing vital connectivity. The new showroom will serve as a laboratory for our visitors to experience first-hand how this integration or architecture, furniture and technology can help promote efficiency in the workplace."

Whether roaming the office or at lunch outdoors in the sunshine, hotspots are becoming common in Grand Rapids, too. At least 10 public access hotspots are found downtown alone; at least seven of them are available at no cost.

Another dozen private hotspots lie along Monroe Avenue from Michigan Street to Fulton Street. Restaurants and coffee houses employ them to attract customers, offices use them to make their employees more efficient, while others — like the Grand Rapids Public Library and web developer Structure Interactive — just give wireless to be nice.

Cities ranging from Atlanta to Grand Haven are implementing plans to spread hotspots throughout their corporate limits.

Also known as wireless canopies or wireless LANs (WLAN), hotspots use high-speed, networking technology — popularly known as Wi-Fi — to allow any PDA or laptop with a wireless card to access the Internet. Cards cost $30 to $100 on the high end, but with Intel’s new Centrino processor that integrates wireless into off-the-shelf laptops, wireless capability is soon to be an industry standard.

Most Wi-Fi networks are based on the IEEE 802.11b or the next-generation IEEE 02.11g international standard, the same protocol associated with wireless broadband.

Setting up a wireless canopy is simple work. It only took 15 minutes for Gemini Publications Production Manager Scott Sommerfield to turn the Business Journal office into a hotspot with appropriate security features.

Sommerfield simply brought in an extra Apple Airport Base Station from home, and plugged it into an Ethernet port to Gemini’s T1 line. This particular router came equipped with its own firewall and encryption application program, allowing him to simply plug-in the base station and set up password access.

A similar model is the Linksys router, with models for as little as $50 and a top-of-the-line router with a built-in firewall and 152-bit encryption for less than $300. Few routers are larger than a hardcover book, and if desired, can be easily hidden.

Setting one up is so simple, it’s funny," said Charlie McGrath, director of creative services at Structure Interactive. "It’s when you start putting things outside that it gets a little more complicated, because then it has to be weather-resistant."

Structure Interactive transformed Rosa Parks Circle into a wireless hotspot. Located in the McKay Tower downtown, McGrath’s group desired Internet connectivity within the park and at adjacent coffeehouses and sandwich shops for company use, but decided to open it to public use as well.

"Our first attempt was just an antenna with a Ziploc baggie around it," he said. "We knew that wasn’t a long-term solution, so we went and got some weather-proof antennas designed for external use — a little pricey, depending on your perspective; something like $1,500 for the antenna. Outdoors you have to worry about the weather, but indoors it’s virtually to the point of plug and play."

At the Community Media Center, Dirk Koning has long been active with wireless. The center’s MOLLIE van has brought hotspots to underprivileged communities, and he is the area’s expert on wireless broadband.

When nonprofit neighbor Steepletown Neighborhood Services began renovating a three-story brick building as its new Steepletown Center, Koning heard the price Steepletown was quoted to wire in high-speed Internet.

"We stepped in and said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! Let’s just put a couple of transceivers on the ceiling of each of the three floors, tie those together to servers and put a mini 6 X 6 transceiver on the smokestack and shoot it across the highway to our smokestack," he said.

"Now they’re getting two-way broadband wireless point-to-point with a canopy in the building connected to our T1 Internet line. It provides a lot more flexibility and we did it for a fifth of the cost."

"A lot of our customers want wireless networks within their offices for convenience and productivity of their workers," said Dan Horne, president of ISG. "There is also a cost savings if there are areas that they don’t want to wire."

Another possibility for Steepletown, or any WLAN operator, is becoming a small Internet service provider (ISP).

"I’ve been talking casually to some of the neighborhood associations about how once you have this connection, you can start your own small wireless ISP, Koning explained. "If he has point-to-point (broadband) already, with a small investment he could put an antenna up on that same smokestack and it would easily have a two-mile or larger radius around that neighborhood. He could provide to either small businesses or individuals in the neighborhood."

Atlanta is deploying is its citywide hotspot in growing numbers of overlapping circles offering free or low-priced service to the surrounding neighborhoods. Grand Haven has enacted a similar private-public partnership.

In Grand Rapids, ISG already has 12 wireless broadband transceivers just along the Monroe portion of downtown, which Horne hopes will one day have enough hotspots to form a Monroe digital corridor.

"I did have a discussion with the mayor’s office about putting together a committee to look into broadband applications and what the potential for wireless is," Koning said. "I talked the mayor about the plan the city of Atlanta is moving along with … he is very interested in Grand Rapids in not just Cool Cities, but ubiquitous connectivity in this town."

Always a concern when dealing with the Internet, and just as important with wireless LANs and hotspots, is the issue of security.

In Rosa Parks Circle, a Sony Vaio with an internal Centrino processor was able to pick up not only Structure Interactive’s hotspot, but five others, one being an open network. At the Business Journal office, there are three WLANs available: Gemini’s, an open access and AMS Computer’s closed system.

"We had a lot of fun when this first started, just walking up and down Monroe Mall and seeing just how many wireless networks showed up," McGrath said. "Just in our listing of networks, there were dozens of them. You can’t connect to all of them. Some are password protected, but some of them aren’t. You can just connect and — bam! — there you are on someone else’s network.

"That’s not a matter of technology being bad or inherently insecure, that’s a matter of it not being set up properly. It’s very easy to make it 99.99 percent secure."

Base stations are designed to broadcast right out of the box. Most come equipped with firewalls and encryption codes, but it is up to the administrator of the WLAN to turn those features on.

"And a lot of times when people do turn on the password, "Sommerfield said, "they leave the password at the default, which is always something like ‘public’ or ‘password.’"

These mistakes open systems up to the practice of "war driving" or "sniffing," where a laptop-totting individual will seek out inadvertent hotspots for personal use.

With a grant from the Urban Cooperative Board, the CMC went sniffing for open LANs in the downtown area.

"We detected a plethora of open wireless networks," Koning said. "And because we’re nice guys, we sent an e-mail to the commercial organizations indicating that they have a totally open network. And that if they couldn’t seal it themselves, they could contact us and we, being nice guys, would tell them how to seal it."

In only one mile, the CMC found 14 networks, seven of which could be accessed.

"None of them were meant to be hotspots," Koning said. "It was only because they hadn’t taken the proper precautions to eliminate people like us there sniffing and finding access."

But it is not only the Internet that outsiders would have access to. To an interested person with the right know-how, a company’s entire network and all information within would be vulnerable.

"If you have your networks protected security becomes a non-issue, "McGrath said. "It would be easier to get into your wireless connection than through any other connection."

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