What future for the wireless Square Mile?

The City of London has taken the wraps off an ambitious project that will see the Square Mile entirely connected by wi-fi access.

For City workers and tourists alike, the project will mean continuous wi-fi access from an area stretching from Blackfriars Bridge to the Fann Street Wildlife Garden and Liverpool Street station.

The City wi-fi project will be a five-year collaboration between the Corporation of London and The Cloud. The network will start rolling out in the next few weeks, and will all but cover the area within six months using some 150 base stations.

The network will provide speeds varying from between 512Kbps to up to 2Mbps or 3Mbps, depending on how many users are accessing the service at any one time. According to The Cloud, it will initially be able to support around 20,000 users - a relatively small proportion of the hundreds of thousands of people working and visiting the area.

The Cloud said the project will eventually cover 95 per cent of the City and if the scheme proves more popular than expected, the operator will keep adding capacity as user numbers grow.

Currently, the jury is still out as to what the killer app will be for such networks beyond straightforward internet access.

Peter Bennett, deputy City surveyor for the Corporation of London, said he expects City workers to start using the network for logging onto company VPNs, rich data access to media and presentation, and even using voice over IP. "Communication is key," he told silicon.com. "Wi-fi is that latest personification of the need for high level communication."

Bennett added that he expected take-up to be popular among sectors including financial services, banking and insurance broking, as well as among advisors, consultants and other workers who spend the greater part of their day away from their desks.

For Niall Murphy CTO of The Cloud, new uses for wi-fi are unclear. "We don't know entirely what application will be the most sought after. In 12 months, Apple could be promoting an iPod with wi-fi and we could find out people want to sync their music on the network. It's a canvas on which people can paint whatever application they like," he told silicon.com.

However, according to analysts, blanket wi-fi won't appeal to the average business user. Dean Bubley, analyst at Disruptive Analysis, said: "It's hard to see what the use cases are. For email [workers] have got BlackBerry, voice they're on cellular – I can't imagine anyone wanting a wireless VoIP phone just for the City. Laptop users tend to be indoors and there's a coverage issue there. The main potential user is the City of London or its contractors."

In such a scenario, The Cloud would effectively act as an outsourcer, supplying connectivity for Corporation employees such as traffic wardens. Westminster City Council is already working on a similar project, using wi-fi to connect up CCTV cameras and provide access to workers including health inspectors.

Municipal wi-fi networks are already starting to take off in cities in Asia and North America, San Francisco and Philadelphia among them. However, the business model for such deployment varies from city to City - Google and EarthLink are proposing a free municipal service while other locales have opted for a flat monthly subscription approach.

The bill for the City of London wi-fi project will initially be footed by The Cloud, with the wi-fi operator and the Corporation sharing the revenues. While The Cloud will install and manage the network, any ISP can offer its services through the network.

For those with an existing account with any of the providers already signed up with The Cloud – including BT Openzone, Nintendo and Skype – buying services is a question of logging in through The Cloud's landing page. Others without an account can buy airtime from The Cloud, also through the operator's landing page.

Mobile operators including O2 are already among the ISPs set to offer their services over the network – and with the telecoms market in flux over the potential cannibalism between wireless providers of varying stripes, the City of London project has been designed with an eye on the future.

According to the City of London's Bennett, the agreement also takes into account the possibility of wi-fi being superseded by another wireless access technology.

One such technology that has piqued the interest of industry watchers is WiMax – a long range broadband access technology which has won the favour of the likes of Intel. A number of cities including Taipei are already looking to the technology for their municipal networks.

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