MuniWireless

In most press releases announcing the creation of a citywide Wi-Fi network or a small Wi-Fi hotzone, the municipality always says that its goal is to make the city attractive to businesses and tourists. But how many cities really know how to use outdoor public Wi-Fi to help tourists?

Here is one easy way, but it does assume that many people will possess a portable Wi-Fi device such as an iPod Touch, an iPhone, a Wi-Fi Blackberry, Wi-Fi enabled Nokia phone. So this may make sense a year or two from now, but I am hoping that cities keep this in mind for the future.

My plan does not involve a lot of expense, is fairly easy to set up and helps local businesses too. Under my plan, the city provides free robust Wi-Fi service in areas where tourists queue for a long time – in front of museums and historic buildings. One to three access points providing a good amount of bandwidth should do it, depending upon the length of the queue and whether it snakes around the building.

Waiting in front of the Reichstag in Berlin, I wish I had Wi-Fi

For example, the other day I was stuck in a long queue outside the Reichstag building in Berlin. Because they only allow a few people in at a time to go up to the glass dome, the wait was between 30 to 45 minutes. If I had an iPhone with me, I could have done the following on a Wi-Fi network, had there been one outside the building:

• read more about the history of the Reichstag and the Bundestag (German parliament)
• watched a video of the architect, Norman Foster, explaining how he came up with the concept for the dome
• found out more about the newly constructed buildings around the Reichstag, for instance, the Paul Lobe Haus, the Chancellor’s offices, and so on.

As it was close to dinner time, I could also have looked at dining options in the neighborhood.

So the welcome splash page for the outdoor Reichstag Wi-Fi network could have provided visitors with a list of: (a) newly opened restaurants in the area; (b) restaurants by type and budget; (c) listings of family friendly places to go in the neighborhood of the Reichstag; (d) list of boutiques and bars.

This is one way that the city can help small entrepreneurs — by helping visitors find restaurants and boutiques that people would otherwise not know of. I could have also gone online to look at what’s going on in Berlin in the evening – classical music concerts, jazz, techno parties, and so on.

In 45 minutes using an iPhone or iPod Touch and the free Wi-Fi service outside the Reichstag (if there had been one), I could have had my evening and even my week planned. I could have made restaurant reservations, bought a ticket to see the Berlin Philharmoniker perform Hector Berlioz’s Requiem, looked up the Deutsche Bahn website to view a schedule of morning trains to Dresden, and so on.

Repeat this scenario in other parts of the world — what would you do if you were queueing in front of the Louvre, the Uffizi Gallery, the Vatican and you had a portable Wi-Fi device and Wi-Fi service?

Note: You might think of using 3G instead of Wi-Fi to go online, but because most people visiting these museums and monuments are from outside the country, they will not want to incur high data roaming fees. In Europe, many operators charge as much as 15 EUR per megabyte.

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