Eterea — New Urban Wi-Fi Landscape, part 4: Proposed Service Description
After research synthesis which led to better understand users and offer in Milan new service approach had to be defined which led to Eterea creation.
Service Approach to Infrastructure:
Infrastructure sets the basic level for all other city structures to be built on, however it gets the least attention from design point of view, and apparently even is not that popular between young engineers generation.
But according to the last trends prediction this situation is to change. Telecommunication companies are the important partners to other industries, as they hold a natural position of power in the value chain. They also hold huge amounts of data which can serve other companies and improving the network user experience by transforming “the dumb pipes into value-adding smart pipes” [34], and becoming users’ companions.
Offer = traffic rules + bandwidth
Focusing on offer in WI-fi — what is it? It is bandwidth, traffic rules and conditions of access to it. Back to water analogy — it will mean exactly how wide is the pipe and so how much water passes in a moment, how big is the maximum volume that you can get — a glass, a bottle, a bathtub, and how you get it — is it drinking fountain, water dispenser, bottled one to buy, etc.
Current Openwifi Milano traffic offer is formulated in a way which users don’t really understand well. They just get the first part “300Mb/day” without realizing the rest. Any 3G operator would market the very same offer as unlimited internet. Structure of offer “300Mb + 1 hour” is also complicated to understand and find reasonable explanation for it.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth defines the speed of connection. It is very important for public Wi-Fi as in the populated hotspots it is being divided between users. For outdoor Wi-Fi, speed also defines the time that user will need to spend there if he wants to download something. It might seem that Wi-Fi use in the city should be similar to that of electrical grids when in the peak hours it is loaded up to the limits of facilities while in the other hours they’re underused, but it is different for internet connection structured as OpenWifi’s one. In reality the bandwidth is divided between amount of connected users:
Unlike other networks (Freeluna, for example) Openwifi is not restricting bandwidth per user. Instead they think that 300Mb/day traffic limit serves this need as after exceeding it user leaves the network letting others access. They say that traffic limit in this way provides everyone the highest quality of service (speed). But in fact this natural flow of things make the service inconsistent and OpenWifi admits it saying in their twitter that in the best conditions users can get 30Mbps speed while other times 4–5Mpbs. It is easily understood by graph in which the “whole” bandwidth is divided between different numbers of users. Difference in speed will be very well perceived through time needed to download any content (making people to stay longer in the space). Besides that many hotspots due to their location don’t even get to be used by many users, so there is a big difference between speeds in various places. This inconsistency in the end severely affects the user experience.
The question is — what do users really want in terms of offer?
In defined categories hanger out would like to watch a movie, socializer access networks, walker just look up some navigation, traffic addicter wants to download things, worker searches high speed. In fact these uses has completely different requirements. It’s like walker is thirsty and wants a glass of water fast and free, traffic addicted would like to get 2l bottle and take it home, socializer can get half a litre and drink it in an hour.
So having all the capabilities of current digital infrastructure why don’t we serve all of them what they really need:
We can limit bandwidth and traffic to the kind of use you want and combine them in different times of day. When it’s too crowded some bandwidth-heavy ones would be limited, but in the empty hours they will occupy existing facilities and provide people with new choices. And as soon as we start delivering peole something beyond the regular service, we can also expect more engagement with them and require giving back some resources activating the larger exchange system for urban services.
The resulting system is the basis of Eterea service proposed: the best connection for the users, a platform to promote their offers for the other service, a tool for better planning for the city.
Eterea serves multiple users providing them 5 options:
Info — automatic connection without any interaction with service at all, you just get to the spot and connect for 100 MB. If you want more — you register and get 500 mb which is the regular Owifi offer, but here you have to login only once and forget about it. If you don’t want to forget and want more — there are 3 more options for different online uses: hourly turbo mode to download fast, daily fun — to stream content, weekly working — to manage flexibly traffic and get good speed.
Two offers are granted for everyone, while 3 other options need to have some credits points and exchange 2,3 or 4 respectively.
Credits can be gained in 3 ways — engage in platform activities improving it, exchange your data and statistics for planning purposes, or participate in offers from partners of system.
Each shape represents person connected, but for different uses they change shape to communicate clearly that if you watch a movie you occupy bandwidth of two people who could just use facebook instead. Each spot gets definite number of “basic” connections and if some are “free” users demanding more bandwidth can connect.
The resulting picture for each space is combined of its material boundaries (which are altered by the real limits of Wi-FI signal spread in it) and elements representing users’ “auras”.
In this way the picture of use in every moment is immediately clear for people, they can understand how many spots are left and whether some special option can be activated. This representation will be changing in real time.
As tangible environment varies in each space, their Wi-Fi use will be also different. This will be simply represented on the map where user can see the whole “landscape” and decide if there is a spot which fits his preferences better.
Check other chapters of Eterea — New Urban Wi-Fi Landscape story:
part 2: Ethnographic Research in Milan
or read the full book:
