Wireless in Westmount?

In the three years that wireless Internet has become a commercially viable option for the average computer user, almost everybody who buys a laptop has opted to have a $100 wireless Internet card thrown into their purchase.

Office buildings, cafés and educational institutions have been the quickest to embrace the technology, often having a wireless internet signal, also known as a hot spot, available throughout their facility.

Now, slowly but surely, municipalities everywhere are starting to look at the viability of having community-wide hot spots. Macedonia made headlines last year by being the first country to support a nationwide wireless Internet zone. In Canada, the most progressive city for wireless Internet is Fredericton, where 8.6 square kilometers of that city—roughly twice the size of Westmount—is under a wireless umbrella.

So where does the city of Westmount stand on this technology?

“At large, right now, we don’t have an immediate plan for wireless networking, although, yes it is identified, and it is on our list, if you want, but it’s not high in our priority yet,� said Jerry Dolar, director of Westmount’s Information Technologies Department.

According to Dolar, we are hardly behind the times either. “We have pretty much completed, with the exception of a couple of areas, our internal municipal network, wireless network. For instance, at city hall it’s wireless, the library is wireless and so on.�

Benoit Morin, who works at the Westmount Library’s reference desk said that their two-year-old wireless Internet signal has been bringing more people in to the library, but more importantly, it’s helping to make the facility more in tune with the needs of today’s students and workers.

“It’s just part of the reality of everybody’s needs now that they’re going to need internet access frequently, so it just makes it so much easier for people who come here to do their work,� said Morin.

At the moment, a walk down Sherbrooke Street’s commercial district, between Grosvenor and Claremont, with a laptop computer, shows that the city isn’t quite at the forefront of public wireless Internet just yet. There were signals coming out of Starbucks and Java U, but that’s all.

Aubert Prévost, Starbucks’ regional director of operations, said that wireless Internet is available at all of their cafés in Canada. He equates it to being one extra service to provide to customers. “We’re helping our customers to stop by and pick up their e-mails, stop for a cup of coffee, do a little work and then continue on their day, or start their day at the store,� said Prévost.

Despite the city being not quite ready to proceed on a citywide wireless project, Dolar said he would be paying particular attention to wireless infrastructure exhibits at the government technology conference he’ll be attending in Ottawa this week.

“Now is the time that ... I’ll have a better chance to see what’s available in the market, what are we looking for in terms of cost: you know, are we in that league,� said Dolar. “Perhaps it’s so prohibitively expensive that we won’t even consider it for a while because we can’t even afford it and if it’s reasonable, we’ll have to see where it fits in to the priorities because obviously council is involved in those decisions.�

The Examiner spoke with Don Fitzgerald, executive director of Team Fredericton, which was the driving force behind that city’s Internet project. He said that to provide wireless hotspots to an area twice the size of Westmount to a city with a population a little more than twice that of Westmount cost roughly $800,000 with annual upkeep fees of about $50,000.

“We had really specked out a much more modest goal that was kind of easy for us to do, but our council had a real vision here and they challenged us to step up to that vision,� said Fitzgerald. “That hasn’t happened to me often that you get more money and more support then you had anticipated.�

Fitzgerald anticipated that Westmount would face similar challenges keeping their wireless transmitters heated during the winter, but also said that being on a mountain could work to our advantage, when it came to sending signals.