Leaning on a Lamppost

He's no stranger to big municipal projects, this Gino Menchini. Since New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg asked him to join the city's technology team as commissioner of information technology and telecommunications in 2002, he has initiated several projects designed to improve communications for the city's emergency and non-emergency agencies, as well as for the public. He's finished a few, too.

He ran the city's Y2K project under Giuliani, he says, and served as chief information officer for the NYC Department of Education. Before that he worked for Cisco Systems and was vice president of information technology for St. Francis College in Brooklyn. In one year, the city implemented under his direction a one-number information service (311) for citizens to contact all city departmental services. Menchini calls it their hallmark project so far.

“It had a real impact,” he said. “We get 10 million calls a year now, and for the first time we have seen a reduction in 911 calls.”

It just so happens that the 311 initiative helped spawn the project Menchini has under way today. One of the functions of the new information service number was for consumers to have a place to lodge complaints about poor cellular coverage. After mapping the results, Menchini decided something had to be done to improve wireless service.

He had only to look out his window for the answer. The city plans to lease approximately 18,000 street lamps, light poles, traffic signs and possibly even rooftops throughout the city to franchisees that can bring affordable, solid service and coverage using a combination of multicarrier antennas and mini cell sites.

There's no name for the project yet — it's just something to improve the service for the city, Menchini says. In the process, the city just might make a few bucks — as in $21 million. Mayor Bloomberg is solidly behind it, Menchini said.

“He is a great advocate of technology. He understands it. His company is based on it. He has been a terrific leader in this area,” Menchini said.

So far, six companies have been awarded franchises to use the pole-top sites: Nextel, T-Mobile, ClearLinx Network Corp., Crown Castle Solutions and Dianet Communications. Menchini said franchises were based neither on existing licenses nor performance criteria identified in the 311 report. “Anyone who met our qualifications was awarded a franchise,” Menchini said.

The project, which is being implemented simultaneously with one aimed at providing municipal agencies with wireless broadband access and may eventually help control traffic signal patterns among other things, is designed to achieve several coverage-related goals: First and foremost, said Menchini, is to make sure New Yorkers have the best infrastructure of any kind that may be available to them.

“It was a real priority for me right after 9/11, since we had a lot of phone outages,” Menchini said. “We wanted more resilience and more redundancy, and wanted them to be in line with where people and businesses needed them to be.”

In addition to improving cellular coverage throughout the city, the project should be able to provide inexpensive IP-based phone service in lower-income areas of Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. Another franchisee, IDT Business Services, has committed to providing Internet-based phone devices to the people in these areas.

There's also a new demographic to worry about: post-college twenty-somethings. “We have a growing population of younger people that forgo having land lines in their apartments,” Menchini said. “They are expecting to get critical services from their cell phones and good in-building coverage.”

The city's Art Commission is overseeing aesthetic concerns, such as matching the color of equipment with that of the poles. “We try to control the aesthetic impact,” Menchini said.

So far, aesthetics have been the least of Menchini's worries. The project, no matter how beneficial or cost-effective it may be, has its detractors. Evie Hantzopoulos, a representative of the Astoria Neighborhood Coalition, wrote an op-ed piece for the “New York Times” blasting Menchini and the city for kowtowing to the telecom companies, for not consulting the community before making its decisions and for ignoring the potential health risks of deploying thousands of antennas throughout the city.

“Despite questionable authority to do so under New York City charter, the deputy commissioner of buildings exempted telecommunications companies from zoning regulations that would have required them to conduct public hearings before mounting the antennas,” she wrote.

Hantzopoulos called for the establishment of a task force to create a policy that guarantees public involvement and safety and the public listing of antenna sites.

Menchini said the city has gone through the necessary oversights and approval processes necessary to move forward with the franchises. He admits there has been some concern in the community about the emissions from cell towers. “But from my perspective, the equipment we are rolling out meets FCC regulations and specifications,” Menchini said.

He added that while the project may not result in fewer full-sized towers right away, it would allow operators to install fewer towers going forward and redirect some existing towers.

New York City actually has gone down the wireless light pole route before. There already are approximately 3000 antennas mounted on light poles from a project started two years ago, which the city considered a success until the supplying antenna company went bankrupt.

Nor is the current project one of a kind. Menchini has watched and learned from a similar project in London. One thing unique about the New York project, however, is that one of the franchisees will deploy a voice over IP solution using 802.11 and target lower-income areas of the city with a prepaid plan.

The stickler, said Menchini, is that the business model is untested. “We have seen the technology work in New Jersey, so we know it works. Whether or not their business model works remains to be seen,” he said. “But we have an obligation to try things out of the box if it's best for the city. They're a reputable company. We'll see how they do.”

The same business model question holds true for a project underway in Philadelphia to wire the city using Wi-Fi. The big question there, according to a report from MIT's Technology Review, is who will pay for it.

The issue at hand is whether or not ubiquitous Wi-Fi coverage should be a public amenity paid for by the city. That, in part, is why Menchini and the City of New York are steering clear of Wi-Fi for now. With their project commanding up to $6000 per month, per location, they have the question of who pays answered.

“We still have some dark clouds on our budget horizon, so whatever revenue we can raise is a positive thing,” Menchini said. “It goes right to the city general fund and we are able to defray some of the cost of government.”

Menchini insists, though, that money is not the city's primary motivation in pursuing the project. “We have an asset in the street poles, and we need to reduce the number of cell towers while providing better service. So it's the right thing to do,” he said. “The fact that we got six franchisees leads me to believe there is, in fact, a demand and it will be a benefit to the public by us making this service available,” Menchini said.

However, the fact that none of his six franchisees were willing to discuss their roles in this project with Wireless Review might say something else. It may say something about Ms. Hantzopoulos and her Astoria Neighborhood Coalition. It could say something about the progress or lack thereof on the project, which is scheduled to have equipment hanging from poles by year's end. Or it could say nothing at all.

“This is something that all cities should be doing,” Menchini said. “We should be supporting the telecommunications industry and raising revenue by making our facilities available. And if we can do it in a way that doesn't present a problem to the public, that's a great thing.”