Eterea — New Urban Wi-Fi Landscape, part 1: Theoretical research
A short summary of theoretical research I’ve conducted for my Master in Product Service System Design thesis about urban Wi-Fi service:
- Why the Internet?
- Why Wi-Fi?
- What is Wi-Fi?
- How Do Cities Make Wi-Fi?
- Internet in Italy
Why the Internet (and the city)?
No need to say that the Internet became essential part of our life and it’s importance and penetration is growing faster than of any other communication medium in the human kind history. UN has even declared the internet access to be one of the basic human rights.
“Virtual” space doesn’t exist on it’s own, but merges with our regular physical space.
“We all shape and are shaped by what happens there” [1]
Perhaps what distinguishes cyberspace, and in particular the Internet, has been the speed of diffusion and growth.
Of course with such rapid growth it is affecting the life of cities and our behaviour:
“Being urban is being online” [2]
Despite many concerns active users of the Internet are also more active in the offline communication. There was a moment when we could complain about people preferring to stay online at home resulting in less life out, but now with global spread of handheld devices situation changes and we bring the Internet to the streets changing our relations to surrounding citizens and environment.
“ICTs and cyberspace are transformative technologies, changing society in a number of ways. They are presently facilitating a process of restructuring, radically altering social, cultural, political, institutional and economic life.” [4]
Telecommunications moved us from local communities to distant networks, requiring new approach to spatial design. Public spaces for many centuries were the main gathering points for communities, but new communication models are changing their relevance. For example, now we don’t need to gather in the city squares to discuss problems with fellow citizens, online forums do this jobs of physical spots. And new models of people’s connections ask for different space organisation.
Today “private cyberspace” can follow person everywhere competing with real public spaces in people’s attention field.
Cyberspace vs. Spatial Organisation of Cities:
Despite obviously changing spatial relations we still haven’t got to “death of the distance” and cyberspace can even help maintaining social authenticity.
The “information age” or the “network society” turn to be not that immaterial or anti-geographic. People still live in a material world and require food, shelter and human contact.
“Cyberspace can provide an antidote to placelessness by providing alternative and more attractive authentic places. If we take the definition of place by Jess and Massey — places are characterized by providing a setting for everyday activities, by having linkages to other locations, and providing a ‘sense of place’ — then there can be little doubt that new places, and new spatialities, are being formed online. Moreover, these places seem to be authentic as they embody a sense of belonging.” [4]
The Internet and Public Realm:
Serendipitous meetings with diverse others are essential for social life of cities, but they don’t usually occur online.
The public realm includes urban public spaces, such as a city’s streets, parks, and plazas, and is part of a much larger public sphere. What is specific about it is hosting planned encounters with existing acquaintances, as well as serendipitous encounters with strangers. The public realm is different from all public spaces because it includes only those “locals” or social settings that minimize the segregation of people based on “life-styles”: values, opinions, gender, race, ethnicity, stage in the life course, and other forms of diversity. There are a lot of hopes regarding how public internet connection in outdoor spaces can bring people back to great diversity exposure and local community participation, however justification of these possibilities require a lot of socioethnographic field work.
Why Wi-Fi?
It might seem that Wi-Fi is losing its popularity with the spread of mobile Internet technology and people paying to have connectivity from their mobile devices wherever they go. It’s true that Wi-Fi cannot compete with 3G in roaming freedom and wide coverage, however it has its own advantages. The main one — it operates in free spectrum and therefor will remain cheaper than 3G. At the moment when our communication culture gets more and more video influences and traffic demand grows outrageously, this quality of Wi-Fi will guarantee its further popularity. Mobile operators themselves seek to offload their networks and turn to Wi-Fi for it.
Why Not 3G?
Wi-Fi is more sustainable option which also has more connection to location and should work together with 3G.
Current fastest Wi-Fi developed is claimed to reach 7 Gbps speed, while commercially available one is passing 1 Gbps. Meanwhile the last developed broadband standart LTE-Advanced is just reaching 1 Gbps, and today users can get around 100 Mbps.
Wi-Fi and LTE small cells are complementary to one another rather than substitutes:
- Off-load solutions potentially permit much greater spectrum re-use over a given geographic area.
- New Wi-Fi equipment will enable higher bit rates by deploying wider channels (80 MHz or 160 MHz).
- Automatic authentication processes for accessing Wi-Fi networks will largely overcome the historic complexity to connect manually to Wi-Fi, namely of the connection and authentication process.
- Solutions that allow individuals to share their bandwidth via Wi-Fi and a number of Wi-Fi roaming aggregators are making public Wi-Fi access more convenient and affordable for many users.” [13]
What is Wi-Fi?
Wi-Fi is a new kind of urban infrastructure. It is different from previous kind by its intangible nature and flexibility of change. It brings together affordances of many levels: of tangible environment on which user experiences it first, of electromagnetic field which we cannot sense, but it defines the spread of signal and therefore experience as well, and in the end it has universal Internet connection affordance suggesting what people can do in cyberspace. These level should be understood deeper to know what can be redesigned.
“Cities are layerings of infrastructures. We read infrastructure broadly here: not just power, water, and sewage, but other infrastructures that define elements of the experience of space.” [15]
Wi-Fi relies on both material an intangible layers of infrastructure which causes new relation of it to the cities. Far from the mythical distributed ideal that ideologists of technology claim it to be, the network has its own physicality, its own material presence. There is always a complex interaction between space, infrastructure, culture, and experience. The spaces into which new technologies are deployed are not stable, not uniform, and not given. Technology can destabilize and transform these interactions, but will only ever be one part of the mix.
Hertzian space
On basic physical level any wireless connection is made of electromagnetic waves. They set specific constraints which should be understood for the best user experience.
Physical properties of wireless signal propagation — the range, signal strength and possible obstacles determine their presence in the environment. The ‘space’ formed by these waves is sometimes referred to as hertzian, because it consists of waves oscillating on frequencies expressed in Hz (SI unit of frequency named after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz). This term is also used to describe “a holistic view of the electronic device and its cultural interactions”[19]. The problem with physicality of the hertzian space is that it is extremely difficult to (accurately) perceive and represent, leaving us with a vague idea about how it actually ‘looks’ like.
Affrodances of Wi-Fi Infrastructure:
Experience of Wi-Fi infrastructure is a mix of elements of different levels which provide new flexibility in design.
The notion of affordances applied to physical (tangible) objects is more or less clear to all of us. There are simple physical and ergonomic laws which make us use object in certain ways in the first point. These are perfectly demonstrated by Munari’s chair research. Then we add psychological, social and cultural elements to it. Each space is constructed and each settings have their own affordances: even though you can lie on any bench in the street, normally you don’t do it, and even homeless people prefer benches in deserted spaces, not in the middle of crowded square in the daylight. But this theory goes beyond the simple tangible interaction and finds its way also to human-computer field.
First of all hertzian space has its own very physical, but not tangible and perceived by us, affordances. There are limits of signal strength, interference with other devices, obstacles, even weather and daylight affect the spread of radio waves. They all define how we perceive the interaction even though we don’t always realize what’s really happening. Second level of it is defined by Internet provider or hardware which results in how fast is connection, how much traffic do we get and in the end — what can we do online. Dial-up connection was completely different from modern broadband. We couldn’t imagine streaming video with it. The same way price of 3G traffic stops users from downloading content.
And in terms of offer digital world allowed uncommon before flexibility. It’s quite difficult to turn off some exact user from water pipe, it takes a lot of work at least, it’s much easier to control electricity grid, but difficult to diversify the offer, and with wireless communication it’s just in the nature of it.
Then tangible world doesn’t leave us even when connecting to Internet. We’re still using devices for it, so we need to sit properly, hold them somehow, they need electricity and screen protection from sunlight and so on and so forth.
Surrounding environment adds to this defining what’s acceptable and not to be done in the specific settings. Cultural code changes it also for different places in the world, Italian public space is different from Russian and even Milanese from Roman. Considering all these facts it’s wrong also to think that “cyber-behaviour” at home and outdoors in public won’t change.
“Nothing takes place in a vacuum. As Paul Dourish observes: “interaction is intimately connected with the settings in which it occurs.” His theory of “embodied interaction” insists that interactions derive their meaning by occurring in real time and real space and, above all, among and between real people. In Dourish’s view, the character and quality of interactions between people and the technical systems they use depend vitally on the fact that both are embedded in the world in specific ways. A video chat is shaped by the fact that I’m sitting in this office, in other words, with its particular arrangement of chair, camera, and monitor.” [21]
So How Do Cities Make Wi-Fi?
It might be said that there were two waves of city-wide Wi-Fi infrastructure projects. First it started with the very development of standard when everyone decided to use it for urban spaces just because it seemed cool to have. However at that moment there was not much demand — relatively littler amount of people bringing their laptops outdoors — but the price of infrastructure was high.
Now there can be seen new interest in city Wi-Fi as mobile devices became primary communication tool and also everyone dreams of smart cities, internet of things and many other ideas which require developed infrastructure.
Besides affordances there is an issue of values that get embeded in the infrastructure
Laura Forlano is one of the researches of municipal Wi-Fi initiatives and implementations who argues that they’re not very well understood by general public and therefor suffer from a technological determinism of dominating in this field engineers. According to Forlano there are several key concepts that will be helpful in describing wireless networks: affordances, infrastructure and values. First two were already discussed above, but the concept of values is very important. It allows to build on the affordances of wireless networks and embed a range of socio-cultural, economic and political values into the infrastructures that is designed.
Internet in Italy
Italy is behind most of other western European countries in its Internet culture development. Statistics tells that the third of population hasn’t ever accessed Internet at all. Those who do access also use it for different reasons — e-commerce or administrative procedures online are not mature enough.
Public Wi-Fi access was a problem in Italy due to legal issues, but now situation changes. Italy spent many years with no real possibility of easy Wi-Fi in public spaces development as it was limited till summer of 2013. Till that moment hotspot owner was obliged to control every person logging in to the network asking their identification data. This was creating a lot of problems with long passwords, complicated procedure and in general spaces lacking any Wi-Fi access at all. After new law as a part of “Decreto del fare” was accepted development of free Wi-Fi access in the country was predicted. However after fast start in the summer 2013 many initiatives just slowed down and disappeared from news.
References:
- US secretary of state Hillary Clinton speech on feb 15,2011
3. Sack, R. “Conceptions of Space in Social Thought: A Geographic Perspective”
4. Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin “Mapping Cyberspace”
5. Manuel Castells “Internet Galaxy”
13. Europe Loves Wi-Fi: New Study Recommends More Spectrum Should Be Made Available. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_ip-13-759_en.htm
15. Genevieve Bell, Paul Dourish “Getting Out Of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters With Space”
19 Dunne, A. “Hertzian Tales Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design,”
20. Norman, Donald A. “The Design of Everyday Things”
21. Adam Greenfield “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing”
32. Digital Agenda for Europe http://digital-agenda-data.eu/charts/
Check other chapters of Eterea — New Urban Wi-Fi Landscape story:
part 2: Ethnographic Research in Milan
part 3: Field Research Synthesis
or read the full book:
