It seems time to open up the OneCleveland network vision of Cleveland Heights, to see if there is value for others

The other day I saw, in The Cleveland Plain Dealer [1] and Crain's Cleveland Business [2], an announcement Case University is funding OneCleveland to put wifi in some high density, affluent commercial and residential rental and home ownership cores of Cleveland Heights. Justifying the expenditure, from Crain's: “Part of the entry into Cleveland Heights is that it’s really an extended community of Case Western,” said OneCommunity chief operating officer Mark Ansboury, and Cleveland Heights law director John Gibbon said. “It’s designed primarily as a trial for the business district, but it certainly will hit a number of residences, as well.” From the PD: "Lewis Zipkin, a major Cleveland Heights landlord" is qouted saying: "It's going to be a terrific benefit for me, my properties and the community". If I were a Case student or trustee, SBC/AT&T, the Cable company or a person living in a less affluent community, I'd have serious concerns about all of this. In fact, as my wife is a Case Ph.D. student being assessed $100s a year by Case for a technology fee, which it now seems is going to Cleveland Heights, I guess I have a right to be concerned myself.

From the PD: "The city (Cleveland Heights) will contribute up to $20,000 (according to Crain's, $17,000) to the project, which may cost $150,000 to $200,000, said Mark Ansboury of OneCleveland. Case Western Reserve University, which has many teachers and students who live in Cleveland Heights, will help with the balance, Ansboury said." So, my wife's Case University technology fee ia a direct payment to the city of Cleveland Heights for wifi services outside of her world - we live in Ohio City and there is no sign of OneCleveland over here, in this corner of the Case Community. And, bottom line, Cleveland Heights is not part of "Case Western".

I understand that when Case opened their new dorm in University Circle it sucked many Case students out of Cleveland Heights, pissing off rental landlords there, and I'm sure future developments around University Circle will drive more Case affiliates and Cleveland Heights residents to the Circle, but that does not make the lovely, wealthy and resource-rich Cleveland Heights suburb a victim needing support from an educational institution struggling in its own ways, nor a reason to toll students already paying top dollar for educations. Cleveland Heights needs to compete with sprawl, not University Circle and Cleveland. If there is an interest and the surplus wealth for Case to provide charity to inner-ring suburbs, I can offer many other suggestions for ways to spend $100,000s where the local residents and tax bases cannot pay the tolls of the new economy.

Further, there are private carriers well established and competing to provide cost effective telecommunications services to businesses, renters and property owners in Cleveland Heights, so how does the OneCleveland service fit with free market capitalism. I can't imagine there are many areas in the sectors planned for service by OneCleveland where there are not multiple people with broadband and wifi available at any time, creating a wireless cloud already. Knowing there is already high saturation, it is likely this service is not needed at all, in Cleveland Heights. If there are public access gaps, it would be a result of people with access points securing them rather than making them open to neighbors. An easy solution would be to encourage access point owners to open up access to neighbors - that can be done in controlled and secure ways, if the community wanted to be progressive. An example of a progressive community building a mesh broadband network environment is found in Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) [3], which is a world- leader in such grass-roots broadband community service and technology.

That is a model we are exploring in trying to help residents of underserved communities of East Cleveland and Cleveland secure access to broadband services, as carriers have underserved their neighborhoods, and poverty there is a significant issue. To see a corporate subsidy model for Cleveland Heights' prosperous core just doesn't make sense.

From the PD: "Cleveland Heights officials think wireless service can aid businesses in the Coventry and Cedar-Fairmount districts, draw quality tenants to dozens of apartments and add attraction to new townhouses. That is important to an inner-ring suburb trying to retain vitality." To me, this rings trite if not unethical - quality tenants in these spaces can afford $12.95 a month. I wonder what 10,000 Case students feel about paying for their toll. And, I wonder what the telcos, non-profits and entrepreneurs working in the free market of this space feel about all this.

On the positive side, I'd love to know what technologies, support and staffing strategies OneCleveland is using to build and maintain this community broadband network, and their business and sustainability models. Is this going to be a mesh network and how will it be designed and constructed? Who is providing and paying for installation, maintenance and tech support over the 18 month pilot? Who owns the hardware and bandwidth and determines how it will be used in the future? What are billing and pricing concepts for the future? Hard to imagine taking miles of core commercial property live without having answers to all these questions, and the rest of the region could benefit from the knowledge. If OneCleveland is one for community, there should be ways to leverage the benefits of the $1,000,000s the community has invested in them to leverage more economies of scale and intellectual property for those not within the OneCleveland community. I suppose that may be the next step, being some insight sharing on how OneCleveland is serving Cleveland Heights, and how that knowledge may serve those not served by OneCleveland.

Even if Case University is unlikely to buy any other communities broadband access, we could at least learn from the successes and failures of their investments in the community, as we work to help those outside the "extended community of Case Western" cross the digital divide. I'll work on setting that up.