LAH joins effort to install WiFi network

By Kate Day, Special to the Town Crier

WiFi hardware provided by Google is visible throughout Mountain View.

This month, San Francisco accepted a bid by EarthLink Municipal Networks and Google to provide WiFi access across the entire city. Impressive, until you hear that Los Altos Hills has agreed to something much bigger.

Los Altos Hills joined the Wireless Silicon Valley Task Force Jan. 12 to work with 35 other cities to provide wireless Internet access to the Silicon Valley, incorporating 1,500 square miles across four counties. The task force released a business model April 5 and is scheduled to request proposals from vendors April 28. The task force expects to recommend a vendor to the cities in September.

The task force was set up by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, founded in 1993 to preserve Silicon Valley’s reputation for innovation and entrepreneurship. The group contends that seamless wireless coverage could benefit public safety as well as bring business opportunities to the valley.

City councilman Dean Warshawsky said Los Altos Hills welcomes the initiative despite the fact that it likely won’t achieve wireless access for all residents. “We decided to partner with Joint Venture: Silicon Valley because it’s important for our town to support regional efforts,” he said. “A good number of Los Altos Hills residents have businesses in the valley and providing wireless will help improve our infrastructure and make us more competitive.”

Seth Fearey, director of Joint Venture’s Smart Valley Initiative, said, “Los Altos Hills is a challenging environment because it is hilly and it has lots of trees.”

WiFi differs from cell phone technology because it uses shorter-range radio waves with a higher frequency, he said. This means that the antennas are smaller than cellular phone towers, but WiFi radio waves don’t penetrate solid objects effectively.

Under Joint Venture’s plan, wireless vendors would design systems to meet the requirements of each city.

Brian Moura, co-chairman of the task force, said the project may revolutionize the way city and county services are provided. Emergency services could access information and file reports from anywhere. A patient’s details could be sent to the hospital from an ambulance, or fire fighters could connect to webcams inside large warehouses, to see what was happening inside a building during a fire. MetroFi, a wireless network provider based in Mountain View, was selected by Portland, Ore., last week to set up and run a citywide network with an emphasis on such public services.

Fearey said that an advantage of the Joint Venture’s project is its flexibility. Google’s project in Mountain View made engineering compromises because political boundaries prevented the most efficient, triangular layout of antennas. Fearey thinks such problems could be avoided if wireless is provided across larger areas.

For more information visit www.wirelesssiliconvalley.org.