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The Wireless City
bigfatlamer writes "This week's NY Times City Section has an article (FRRYYY) on wireless access in New York City's busiest park, Bryant Park. The director of the park has installed a free 802.11b network with complete coverage of the park with help from NYC Wireless. From the article: 'With some clever engineering and hardware from Cisco Systems and Intel, the wireless park was born. Just as park users could sit wherever they liked, so too could they gain access where they liked. The eight-megabytes-per-second connection was as free as the sunshine and the green grass.' NYC Wireless is currently working with the Parks Dept. to put similar networks in Madison Square and Tompkins Square Parks. If they could do Prospect Park (3 blocks from my house) life would be perfect." NYCwireless helps those who help themselves...
Amazing that this park is run by a private company and not by the city?
See company's can do nice things...
Don't bash all of them
Interactive, engaging and site-specific applications are a click away. The Dialtone Symphony (.ram) is wholly produced through the choreographed ringing of people's own cell phones. Here are some other ideas:
The Public Review Draft of Portland's Waterfront Park Master Plan is available on-line.
The Morrison Bridge, in the center of Waterfront Park, has phone line access. An Orinoco 2500 ($1000) could drive Wi-Fi repeaters on the north end (near Saturday Market) and the south end, (near the Alexis Hotel), providing blanket coverage. The repeaters could be camouflaged as animals or Oregon historic figures. Waterfront Park also has a direct shot to the Council Crest tower where Winfield Wireless has a wireless ISP.
Rent out Segway Scooters with built-in Pocket PCs. Your GPS position would trigger Oregon Historical Society's Narrated Neighborhood Tours, Portland Visitor's Association's Self-Guided Tours, Portland Metro Maps or Lewis and Clark Maps. Wireless cameras could be helpful for the police, too.
Jacksonville Florida's free wireless hot spots provide tourist information as well as internet access. Multi-lingual kiosks, incorporating webtablets with language translation are available now. Text to speech can be output in a variety of languages. And it sounds good. Human voice samples are now incorporated into text to speech. Choose a language, respond by voice.
Parks have not caught up with the wireless society. Let's make it happen!
In the Wireless Network I worked for on my city, we had quite a few problems with kids using bandwidth for piracy and whatnot. As a result, we unfortunately had to block p2p ports, but the free service has been good for our community.
Not sure what your opinion of NYC is as a whole, but I have to tell you that Bryant park is a very, very nice area to hang about in.
I first visited it because my girlfriend works for a downtown revitalization consortium in my city, and when I went to visit NYC (this was a couple years ago) she had me take a pile of photos and QuicktimeVR nodes of the park -- as it's the very model of an urban public park these days. It's a few blocks north of the Empire State building.
Awesome grass, pretty trees, an awesome view, upscale sandwich carts (reminds me of Central Park) -- and get this:
The tables and chairs in the park aren't concrete or nailed down. They're comfortable and light and you're encouraged to shift and move around anywhere on the block.
It's a *VERY* popular lunch and sunbathing spot.
It's a pretty huge experiment that's been really successful and is being copied by a lot of cities trying to revitalize their own downtown areas right now.
Sure, you get a couple of wierdos from time to time -- but, hell! It's New York City! You *PAY* to hang around those same wierdos in the Village come nightfall.