It’s stunned me how long it has taken New York City to get to this point… Philadelphia tried and fell on its face circa 2005. Other cities, especially abroad, have largely succeeded. Hell, even Montreal has free citywide Wi-Fi (And there it is even provided by a community cooperative.)

I remember 2001–2 when we launched NYCwireless on May 1, 2001 (yes, International Worker’s Day, and yes at a Starbuck’s on Union Square, but no… a complete and total coincidence!). To give you a sense of the vibe of those gatherings, here’s an excerpt of those days from my book SMART CITIES:

NYCwireless, as we called ourselves, held its monthly communion on the first Tuesday of every month. The meetings began in the early evening with demos and discussions about new wireless gadgets. They ended, as often as not, well past midnight over beers at a downtown bar. Around tables strewn with empty glasses and bottles, a dozen or more geeks would stay up late making plans to spread free networks throughout the city. Bike messenger bags stuffed with wireless routers, antennas, and patch cables lay underfoot.

Eventually it became clear that all of the early organizers held one shared aspiration — we thought Wi-Fi internet access should be free everywhere in New York City.

We started lighting up street corners outside of our apartments… I stuck an antenna out the window of my NYU office on Washington Square (and soon after almost lost my job , when two of my ITP students decided to try it out and got spotted by university IT official— thanks Carlos Gomez de Llarena and Yury Gitman!)

We knew New York was never going to be easy. Such a big city, with such strong corporate telecommunications and media interests, so tight with the mayor. So we picked our hotspots strategically — it was no coincidence that the free high-profile hotspot NYCwireless put up was in Bryant Park, directly in front of the old Verizon corporate headquarters. (That project was initiated by Marcos Lara and designed and installed largely by Terry Schmidt).

The next stop was the Financial District, where we must have been divining the future of Occupy Wall Street. The first node went up at Bowling Green, the city’s oldest public space, and 6 others followed, including one at Liberty Plaza (later Zuccotti Park) which unfortunately was decommissioned sometime in the late 2000s during the park’s renovation. And including one at the 60 Wall Street Atrium in the Deutsche Bank building, which was used by organizers to upload video during the OWS protests. And ironically, since the Wi-Fi was operated by the Downtown Alliance, a local business improvement district funded by commercial property taxes, Deutsche Bank was indirectly subsidizing the infrastructure of the revolution (yay ironies of capitalism!)