Statewide wireless network starts taking shape

PHOTO COURTESY STRATUM BROADBAND A WORKER installs RI-WINs equipment on top of the Brown University Sciences Library.
PHOTO COURTESY STRATUM BROADBAND

A WORKER installs RI-WINs equipment on top of the Brown University Sciences Library.


Tim Thorp, computer education manager at Brown University, is one of the first people with a computer linked to a wireless network expected to expand statewide.

The R.I. Wireless Innovation Networks (RI-WINs) was launched in late April when a WiMAX station was installed atop Brown’s Sciences Library at the corner of Thayer and Waterman streets on Providence’s East Side. The station is the first of what will be a statewide network, making Rhode Island the first state in the country with border-to-border wireless Internet capability.

“The technology is there, and it’s working,” said Ellen J. Waite-Franzen, Brown’s vice president of computing and information services, who observed Thorp tapping the long-awaited network from his laptop at a recent staff meeting.

Starting in the fall, Waite-Franzen said, Brown graduate students studying education will have laptops containing wireless cards linked to the RI-WINs network. They will carry the laptops when working in local schools.

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Aiming to open up a statewide wireless service within 18 to 24 months, RI-WINS organizers are piloting the program for the next six months with Brown and four other trial users. The Business Innovation Factory (BIF), the nonprofit behind the wireless project, plans to install another antenna station in Newport early next month to complete the pilot’s infrastructure, said Stuart Freiman, a technology sector manager at the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, another partner in the effort.

The R.I. Department of Health plans to equip workers with the mobile technology when they go to inspect restaurants throughout the state, enabling them to send reports from the field.

Looking to give transit workers the same capability, the R.I. Department of Transportation is participating in the program’s test round as well. Freiman said the agency’s workers already carry laptops, yet lack Internet access. Woonsocket-based CVS Corp. has agreed to try out the technology with its IT workers to use when they make repairs at retail outlets, he said.

Perhaps the most high-profile pilot application is for port security in Narragansett Bay.

With a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, RI-WINS will contribute wireless coverage along with other network providers in the state to help Coast Guard personnel connect more quickly to the information being collected around the bay.

The WiMAX antennas being tested are expected to have an effective range of 12 miles over water and seven miles on land, Freiman said.

To cover the entire state, he said, would require about 120 WiMAX stations and include Wi-Fi antennas, which send signals out about 200 yards. BIF has projected that the total infrastructure and installation will cost about $20 million, which Freiman said would come from a variety of public and private sources.

The project’s backers have been quick to point out that RI-WINs differs from wireless networks operating or proposed in places such as Tempe, Ariz., Philadelphia and Manhattan, which are municipal projects.

“What makes the RI-WINs unique nationally … is that it is being led by a nonprofit entity and not by a government or municipal government agency,” said Andy Cutler, a spokesman for the EDC and BIF.

In fact, BIF’s wireless initiative has private-sector support from Intel, IBM and Lucent Technologies, as well as state and federal government backing, according to the nonprofit.

The group’s feasibility study released last May projects that the statewide system would have 25,000 subscribers each paying $250 in user fees per year and generating revenue of about $6.3 million. Operating costs were placed at $5 million, meaning that more than $1 million would be available for other projects.

The bigger picture, Frieman said, is that the network will serve as a working model for “Innovation @ Scale,” BIF’s concept of using Rhode Island’s small size as a plus rather than a minus in growing the state’s economy.

Saul Kaplan, acting director of the EDC and founder of BIF, began the process to make Rhode Island the first state with a border-to-border wireless network in January 2004. RI-WINs is one of several initiatives under way at BIF, which is staffed primarily by employees from the EDC.

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