Word: fi
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...telling this story, Stalter likes to punch up his patter with wireless-industry slang. When he talks about bringing wi-fi to an area, he says he's going to "paint it!" or "light it up!" But the reality isn't that dramatic. Though they sound like a secondary weapons system from the starship Enterprise, the phased-array antennas are actually large, featureless beige-and-gray nubbins that sit unassumingly next to AC units on rooftops. It's almost impossible to pick them out of the skyline, though there are six of them in downtown Spokane, along with 12 smaller...
...Crilly, working with another HP engineer named Bob Conley, figured out a way to run a regular wi-fi signal through a phased-array antenna, a powerful piece of hardware that's used mostly by the military. Suddenly, they had a wi-fi hot spot a couple of miles wide. The world had never seen that before. If a regular wi-fi transmitter was a candle, this thing was a baseball-stadium spotlight. They called it, for reasons best known to themselves, Little...
...nearly as many as they needed to sell. Stalter came on board in October of last year. A fast-talking veteran of the high-tech scene, he specializes in taking over companies that have lost their way. Stalter's job: to figure out what Crilly and Conley's wi-fi spotlight was good for and who would pay good money...
...games around the city. Scoring and scheduling are a nightmare of confused people scurrying about, carrying little slips of paper with numbers on them--exactly the kind of problem technology is supposed to eliminate. So somebody had the bright idea of sticking one of Vivato's prototype wi-fi transmitters on top of Spokane city hall and flooding a few blocks of downtown with wi-fi, thus allowing all the scoring to be done online. The setup was about as ugly a piece of jerry-built hackery as you're ever likely to see--the workers ended up bolting...
Meanwhile, a local commercial ISP called 180 Networks had been studying ways that urban wi-fi could attract more people to Spokane's downtown area, which was in need of a little revitalizing. As Starbucks has learned, people tend to hang out more if there's free Internet access to be had. They check their e-mail. They linger. And while they're lingering, they spend money. Light bulbs started appearing over people's heads all over town. Why not make downtown one big wireless zone? The city geeks, the Vivato geeks, the 180 Networks geeks and a local business...