City's Wi-Fi dreams aren't quite reality

By todd murphy

The Portland Tribune, Jan 19, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (15 Reader comments)

Marketing consultant Adam Boettiger, working on his laptop computer at Island Joe’s downtown, says he and other people have had trouble accessing the city’s free wireless service.

JIM CLARK / PORTLAND TRIBUNE

Michael Weinberg can actually see the ideal — the ideal embodied by that gray milkshake-cup-like transmitter that sits atop the traffic signal not 50 feet from his second-floor office window.

The problem — the problem for more than a few Portlanders, in fact — is Weinberg is not living the ideal. He’s living the reality.

And the reality, for many, is that Portland’s much ballyhooed, six-week-old “free” wireless network — which uses those gray “access points” to supposedly give downtown Portland and a few other pioneering neighborhoods free and easy Wi-Fi, or wireless access to the Web — isn’t working very well.

Or, at least, it isn’t working as many expected it to work. It’s not giving people free wireless Internet access inside their offices or homes. Not unless — and sometimes not even when — they purchase a $120 piece of special equipment meant to boost the signal from outside their building to inside it.

“Overall, I have not been terribly impressed with it,” said Weinberg, a longtime wireless user. He adds that “given the difficulty of connecting inside … and given the need for (the additional equipment) for many inside connections … that certainly makes ‘free’ much less ‘free.’ ”

Officials with the small California company that is building the wireless system — and city of Portland officials who helped select the company to build the system, which is not costing the city any money — said they believe the system is working well, for the most part.

Negative reaction to the system “has been very little,” said Kim Rose, a spokeswoman for the company, MetroFi. “The calls that have come in have been so minor.”

Matthew Lampe, the city’s chief technology officer, said there have been some complaints about no service inside or from people who thought their neighborhood was supposed to have service when it doesn’t yet.

But, Lampe said, “every day, there are hundreds of people who use (the system) and they’re staying on for a long time.”

Still, talk to people on the ground — or in Portland coffeehouses, which often offer free wireless access through other systems — and at least some of the views of the MetroFi system are decidedly less rosy.

Adam Boettiger, a marketing consultant, was using his laptop to access the Web through a wireless “hot spot” at the Island Joe’s cafe in downtown Portland Wednesday morning.

He had heard of the city’s wireless system a few weeks ago, Boettiger said, but has seldom tried to use it — because of initial difficulty accessing it and because he had heard so many complaints about people having no luck in using the system.

“It’s poor or marginal indoors, and it’s obviously too cold to bring a computer outdoors. So I haven’t spent a whole lot of time trying to access it,” Boettiger said.

Coverage area still small

The Portland City Council last July approved the agreement with MetroFi to build the roughly $10 million system, which is expected to be rolled out over about 18 months and provide service to 95 percent of the city by mid-2008.

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