Downtown Kansas City is getting a lot more connected this week. This morning, the city is turning on a swath of free, public Wi-Fi along a new two-mile streetcar line on Main Street downtown, along with two dozen kiosks giving visitors up-to-the-minute ideas of where to go.

It's all part of KC's transformation into a "smart city," and the biggest tech hub in its part of the country. KC is near Sprint's hometown of Overland Park, Kansas, and was the first Google Fiber community. The city has been nurturing tech start-ups in the Crossroads and Westport View neighborhoods for a few years now, helped in part by Sprint. (Crossroads is bisected by the streetcar line and the Wi-Fi network.)

So it's not surprising that Sprint is a big part of this rollout, too, and I suspect KC will be the site of some of the company's future 5G tests. The Wi-Fi build, which stretches along the streetcar route from the River Market to Union Station, is made up of small cells tacked to light posts—the same kind of layout Sprint CTO John Saw told me is boosting the power of Sprint's "LTE Plus" network and will be necessary for 5G.

"The cells have a pretty good transmission range," said Bob Bennett, the city's chief innovation officer. "It's half to three-quarters of a block, and we have 328 of the small cells located throughout the zone."

The Wi-Fi will serve visitors wandering past attractions like KC's Power and Light entertainment district, but it will also serve the 25,000 residents and various businesses in the area, Bennett said. He said he knew of one local who lives on the tenth floor of a nearby apartment building and gets a solid signal. Since KC has plenty of sprawl, major ISPs don't see the municipal network as a threat—at least yet.

"I've had conversations with a couple of the other ISPs, and there hasn't been any angst about it," Bennett said. "Our city is 320 square miles of real estate, and I have now digitized a little less than 1 percent of it."

KC's Kiosks

A neighborhood-wide Wi-Fi blanket also enables a bunch of other smart city experiences. All the traffic lights are smarter than the average blinker, for instance: they stay green to allow streetcars to move smoothly, and they link together to allow "masses" of traffic to get through the downtown corridor without choking things up.

Visitors are most likely to notice the 25 gigantic, Windows-based "KCity Post" kiosks around downtown, which give local business information. They've become a bit of a landmark for crowds leaving events at the Sprint Center, Bennett said, with groups telling each other to "meet me at the kiosk."

"Instead of five people staring at their phones, we're dragging people's noses up from their phones," he said. That said, there will also be a KCity Post app in the future for people who want to continue staring at their phones.

Beyond the usual Googling, the kiosks allow for local businesses to very tightly target people visiting downtown—for instance, advertising only to people on one specific street between the hours of 9 and 11 a.m.

"It's hyper local, hyper focused advertising," Bennett said.

The Wi-Fi network officially goes live today, and the streetcar opens to the public tomorrow. The two-mile-long streetcar route is free to ride.

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