| Travelling abroad never starts off as romantically as you would hope. Your flight landed an hour ago but despite pushing your way through immigration queues, duty-free queues and bathroom queues, you are still inside the terminal. The airport holds you hostage for a little longer with its one precious commodity: free Wi-Fi. Staying inside is your last chance to check the route to your hotel or speak to the Airbnb host before you are at the whims of your local SIM card, if you remembered to buy one. |
| Beyond food and water, access to the internet is now as close to a necessity for life as possible. Every day, we rely on it in some form and if we are not using it directly, we depend on services that are. When you go outside, you may not think twice about having connectivity because your phone is connected to a mobile network and going from indoor Wi-Fi to outdoor networks is seamless. When you switch networks, you are likely changing from an indoor Wi-Fi network to a mobile network such as 5G. Inside, Wi-Fi is both reliable and effective but setting it up for outdoor use has often posed far more challenges. As governments try to ensure that residents have access to internet connectivity, they have often run into problems when setting up ‘municipal Wi-Fi networks’. |
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| The biggest challenge that outdoor Wi-Fi networks face is that cities are packed with obstacles. At home, there may only be two thin walls and a floor between you and your router but cities are dotted with buildings, trees and even other competing networks. To understand why Wi-Fi is particularly bad in these settings, we have to look at what it is. |
| Wi-Fi uses radio waves to create wireless connections between devices. Radio waves have the lowest frequency and largest wavelengths which make them ideal for communications. They are able to ‘bend’ around the curvature of the Earth and travel large distances without posing a significant risk to humans. |
| Some key definitions: Wave frequency: The number of times a full wave cycle passes a given point in one second or ‘oscillates’. It is measured in Hz (Hertz) but high frequencies are often measured in GHz (Gigahertz), the equivalent of one billion oscillations per second. High-frequency waves are able to carry a lot more data, however, have a much shorter range and are poor at penetrating surfaces. |
| Wavelength: The distance between two identical and consecutive points on a wave. These are the points from which a wave begins to repeat such as the crests or the troughs. Longer wavelengths tend to lose energy more slowly and are suitable for travelling long distances and penetrating through buildings. A good example is your local FM radio station. |
| Wi-Fi was designed to provide access over a small, localised area and scaling it up requires engineering to counteract Wi-Fi’s inherent characteristics. Technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth operate on what are known as ‘unlicensed frequencies’ which do not require the provider to obtain a license from the government in order to use them. They were created as a means to allow individuals to use wireless networks with minimal restriction for their own or internal commercial use. These frequencies have to abide by power consumption limits and as a result, cannot travel as far as mobile networks. |
| Unlicensed frequencies create a ’free for all’ and Wi-Fi networks can become extremely crowded with multiple users. If you are a student, you may have already experienced the unreliability of congested Wi-Fi networks when trying to connect to your campus network. When multiple devices are using the same frequency, signals can overlap and muddle, causing them to be retransmitted. Other electronic devices such as microwaves also emit electromagnetic waves which further distort and degrade the quality of a Wi-Fi signal. |
| Outdoors, especially at the city scale, the number of electronic and physical obstructions are exponentially higher. Concrete walls, windows and other surfaces reflect and dampen signals causing more interference and errors in transmitting signals. |
| To overcome Wi-Fi’s short range, cities have to install multiple, often thousands of individual connection points. At home, your Wi-Fi router is connected to an Ethernet cable which connects the router to the wider public internet. Installing thousands of routers in outdoor spaces would mean building countless wired connections so outdoor settings tend to use Wi-Fi ‘meshes’. These use a series of transmitters to create a network connected back to one router, however, the more ‘hops’ a signal has to make from transmitter to receiver, the poorer the quality of the signal. Wi-Fi’s biggest problem in outdoor public spaces is the sheer amount of infrastructure required to negate its inherent properties. |
| Lack of access means that people are unable to take part in activities that are required for sustaining a person in today’s world. From personal investing to accessing school admissions, providing reliable internet connectivity must be a priority for governments. |
How can it work?
| Despite the drawbacks, Wi-Fi is still a preferred method of introductory wireless connection for urban development. The lack of a license and the near blanket compatibility with modern devices lowers the barrier for adoption while providing a moderately usable connection. |
| Public Wi-Fi’s biggest case study can be found in Mexico. In 2013, the country declared access to the internet a human right. It invested $1 billion in a countrywide connectivity programme, an effort most visible in its capital, Mexico City. Amidst a wave of digital-first services within the city, the capital implemented the world’s largest free Wi-Fi network. It piggybacked on existing infrastructure such as lamp posts and camera towers in order to build a network of publicly available Wi-Fi hotspots, crossing 21,000 in 2021. As schools in the city closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, it became a backup source of connectivity for students without reliable internet access. But despite the extensive coverage provided, it too is not immune from patchy and unreliable coverage during peak hours and in crowded areas. |
| The story of patchy Wi-Fi is intertwined with political incentives. Wi-Fi’s democratic and openly available nature has made it a brilliant tool to garner support under the guise of democratic internet access. The initial setup is quick and relatively cheap, making it an ideal short-term political tool for many politicians. However, in order to make systems work effectively, they require robust maintenance and cabled infrastructure (no matter how limited) in order to provide meaningful coverage. Successful Wi-Fi programmes have to account for and fund not just the basic setup but the long-term implementation and maintenance of their support infrastructure. |
Wider networks
| The question of public Wi-Fi sits within the larger topic of access to the internet. Only half of the world uses the internet but the vast majority of us are affected by chains and networks that depend on it. Small businesses use it to advertise their products and conduct instantaneous payments whilst cultural organisations use it to archive and spread the arts beyond galleries and theatres. Access to the internet by the general population is one of the key elements of global development today and governments like in Mexico are working towards providing equitable access. Ensuring that rural and impoverished communities are able to connect to wider networks is essential for wellbeing and economic progress, ensuring that more people are able to connect to local and global systems. Lack of access means that people are unable to take part in activities that are required for sustaining a person in today’s world. From personal investing to accessing school admissions, providing reliable internet connectivity must be a priority for governments. For tourists, it provides the mobility required to spend money within local businesses, adding to the welfare of small businesses. Public and citywide Wi-Fi networks are a step in the right direction but as cities urbanise, they become physically less suitable for connectivity. Public Wi-Fi has to look beyond the transmitters fixed onto lamp posts and make sure that the ‘invisible’ connections are able to keep up with the demand and the hurdles of connecting in cities. Providing widespread connectivity is not just a matter of another ‘nice to have’, it is a necessity to bring more people into the global network. |