The Web Over Hawkwood |
What would happen if you could get your broadband Internet access for free? Thanks to a gutsy (maybe foolhardy) upstart, a Calgary suburb is about to find out
by Heidi Staseson
On a Saturday morning last October, Alain Dubreuil awoke to a slushy wet mess. The forecast had called for light rain, tapering off. By 8 a.m. there was 20 centimetres of snow. Not good for the outdoor “Fall Family Fun Event” he and his new company were hosting that day for the Hawkwood community in northwest Calgary.
Dubreuil was expecting a turnout of 100. He got 25. Averting the snow-covered bouncy gym, guests make-shifted inside a community church where kids decorated pumpkins, had faces painted and watched balloons twist into mammals, all while the grownups sampled an assortment of harvest pies and drank hot chocolate.
“That was our first event,” says Dubreuil, referring to the third thrust in his company Naeco Communications Inc.’s guerrilla marketing campaign.
A month later, he found himself hoisted by a cherry-picker onto a lamp pole.
When you’re a telecommunications startup whose goal is to blanket a bedroom community of 3,450 households with free Internet bandwidth, and you’re alone running the show, you become a jack of all trades. Loftier municipal Wi-Fi mesh endeavours have failed in recent years, and there are large broadband incumbents working to see that you do too.
For Dubreuil, a Realtor by profession, the lines between business operations, sales and and technological support blurred when the CEO of Vancouver parent company Brella Wireless Inc. assigned him the rights to implement Brella’s methodologies and technology to the Alberta market. Position Naeco as Canada’s first for-profit, community-based Wi-Fi mesh network. Launch it as a free wireless alternative to the behemoths on the block, a more affordable provider of high-speed bandwidth, and allow for both indoor and outdoor usage. Just as important, add value in the form of grassroots, community advertising initiatives.
For Dubreuil, the first part, coming up with a company name, was easy. He chose Naeco, or “ocean” spelled backwards. The rest was no cakewalk, though. There were layers of bureaucracy to sort through, negotiating deals with the City of Calgary, the utility companies and the community associations. Of course, you’ve got to build the mesh, the spiderweb-like pattern of radio signals that beam out from antenna nodes fastened to city streetlights. Hopping from signal to signal, in no fixed pattern, the nodes simultaneously communicate one telephonic message intended for its base station mesh point – trying to find the fastest route to get there – eventually manifesting as a clear Internet connection for the household users below.
Wi-Fi evangelist (his real title) Karl Garcia, who leads the Google WiFi project in Mountain View, Calif., a thriving and robust wireless mesh network serving 32,000 households with free Internet access, describes Google’s mesh as a Wi-Fi umbrella where 500 lamp posts act as a necessary and constant power source. Height is key, he says: “The streetlights are perfect for this. The higher the radios are, the better coverage they have.”
The first hurdle, Dubreuil notes, is getting on them. First he had to negotiate a lease with the city for 23 poles in Hawkwood, 18 of which were rusted and had to be replaced. Then he had to install the hardware. Then he had to let the community know Naeco had arrived.
“Our goal is to get absolutely everybody in the community of Hawkwood that has a computer to register for the free service,” says Dubreuil, conceding that achieving 100% penetration – even with unbeatable pricing – is a utopian dream. Telus’s High Speed Lite service for a bundled plan, for example, which is virtually the same as Naeco’s free service in bandwidth, costs $10 per month for the first six months, thereafter reaching $20 per month. Similarly, Naeco’s 1.5 megabytes-per-second (MBps) Go Express service is capped at $19.95 per month, while Telus’s equivalent is $15 per month for the first six months, after which it increases to $30 per month. Naeco’s most costly service is the Go Sonic plan which proffers six MBps for $39.95, while Telus’s High Speed Turbo at 10 to 15 MBps starts at $28 monthly for six months, after which it climbs to $43.
Dubreuil says drawing residents in with Naeco’s “free factor” might be the catalyst to turn them on to the faster premium services. The dream scenario would be if they were to indefinitely ditch their regular Internet service provider. Brella CEO Ben Yan asserts Naeco’s goal isn’t to compete with the telcos per se; the community vision is a more important focus. Dubreuil is more dogged: “These guys have got cable buried in the ground for a century and look how much they charge for this stuff… and that’s because there’s been no competition…. We already have a list of 50 to 60 who said they’re ready to switch.”
Neither Shaw nor Telus is trembling. “There’s a lot of people that have actually fallen on their swords with regards to this particular wireless play,” says Peter J. Bissonnette, president of Shaw Communications Inc. “It’s not something that concerns us…. We’ve run into Naecos in many of our communities and they tend to have a short lifespan just because of the reliability factor.”
David Neale, chief futurist (again, real title) and senior vice-president, strategic content and services for Telus Consumer Solutions, fails to see the logic in bringing to market a service to compete with an otherwise effective one. “This is a subdivision in Calgary, right? So basically they’ve been importing coal to Newcastle here,” he quips.
At Naeco’s open-house launch in early December, 85% of the 75 local attendees registered for the free service. Yet, glad-handing and pole climbing aside, Dubreuil still has his marketing work cut out for him. For starters, how do you get a community to glom on to your services, let alone glance your way, when you’re the new kid? Sure, you may offer a “freemium,” but does “free” trump optimized service?
In the bigger picture, how do you respond to critics who attribute the failure of several North American “Muni-Fi” mesh networks to financially unfeasible business models – the free, ad-driven model and the blended model of free and paid-for services? The most famous of these were the 2006 launch in San Francisco of a Wi-Fi project by EarthLink Inc. in partnership with Google and in Philadelphia two years later with EarthLink’s $17-million,135-square-mile companion endeavour. Toronto Hydro Telecom’s “One Zone” network started out offering free Internet access to members in six square miles of the central business district (with a plan to expand citywide), but quickly morphed to a subscriber-based service with net costs of $28 per month. Resulting poor subscriber figures led to scrapping the expansion. Then in 2008 the utility sold the network to Cogeco Data Services for $200 million.
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