“Almost immediately, ‘wireless Internet’ took off in homes, businesses and coffee shops, here in Ashland and around the world.” Continuing where we left off, Apple’s 1999 “AirPort” was a big step in distributing the WiFi Future, but it wasn’t quite “wireless Internet” yet. It was wireless, but it wasn’t Internet.
Not-so-coincidentally, in 1999 the city of Ashland, with help from many of us citizens, was working on a way of distributing the Internet Future city-wide. The Internet (still capital “I”) was already here, but it was distributed mainly by slow phone lines and dial-up modems. Ashland being a small town in a rural valley, we were worried that the nascent “high speed” Internet revolution would pass us by. So we rolled our own.
The Ashland Fiber Network (AFN) will no doubt be the subject of Future posts. For now, it would serve as the Internet part of “wireless Internet.” As AFN rolled out, AirPort base stations (the predecessors of WiFi routers) could be connected to it, making wireless high-speed Internet available to iBooks and other laptops that supported the rapidly advancing AirPort/802.11/WiFi standard (other companies once again saw Apple’s Future writing on the wall and followed suit).
Fiber networks are not easy. By early 2001, only a small part of Ashland had access to the high-speed Internet Future through AFN. How to distribute it more evenly? Yes, wirelessly. But as we all know by now, WiFi’s range is limited to a few hundred feet. Where was a popular, central place in Ashland that would have a bunch of people with laptops hanging out?
Coffee shops! In particular, in those days there was a new Starbucks right in downtown. The management (local management anyway), hadn’t heard of AirPort, 802.11, wireless Internet or WiFi, but they were more than happy to try anything that might keep those laptops in their shop longer.
Yes, perhaps the first Starbucks anywhere in the world to provide wireless Internet access was right here in Ashland! But we weren’t thinking just one coffee shop or even one business. Once AFN was fully rolled out, the whole town could be (un)wired!
And so another opportunity for Alan and his partner-in-crimes Jim Teece. We called it Ashland Unwired. Our two companies, Project A (Jim) and Open Door Networks (Alan) worked with the city to install AirPort-based systems in businesses and locations throughout town. We even provided a directory of Ashland Unwired locations, so citizens and tourists alike knew where the Future was available.
Our local newspaper, the Ashland Daily Tidings, ran an article on Alan and Jim’s Ashland Unwired project. The first line in the article: “The future is here.”
