The nightmarish events of this week remind us how vital communications are during a disaster. People need information in an emergency, and with the prevalence of mobile devices, Wi-Fi is often the best way to get that information during a crisis.

After the bombings in Boston this week, people reached for their mobile devices to contact loved ones or gather information. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms lit up with warnings to text rather than call in order to save bandwidth, as well as requests for people to open up closed Wi-Fi networks. There were conflicting reports about whether cellular networks were shut down to avoid the remote detonation of more explosives, but ultimately the carriers confirmed that networks were just congested.

Communications, understandably, became chaotic. In New York, we saw it with 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, and the Northeastern blackout of 2003. This is why urban planners and government officials need to take a hard, serious look at offering citizens blanket, municipal Wi-Fi connectivity in times of crisis.

Why No City-Wide Wi-Fi?

Municipal Wi-Fi is certainly not a new topic. New York and other cities have tried to implement "always-on" wireless connectivity in areas such as parks and public spaces as far back as 2010 (or at least Wi-Fi, for a small charge of $0.99 a day).

Three years later, except for the recent news of Google bringing free Wi-Fi to one Chelsea neighborhood there are no wide-reaching public hotspots in New York City. Most are limited to very small areas—such as the immediate area around City Hall—or are offered by private industry.

In fact, there are no large cities in the United States providing full municipal Wi-Fi. There are smaller towns and cities that offer paid, time-limited, or free connectivity in specific areas such as tourist centers or common public squares. Yet, no municipal Wi-Fi or back-up Wi-Fi for emergencies exists in any major U.S. city—cities that attract millions of tourists and are potential targets for terrorist attacks.

Lack of ubiquitous municipal Wi-Fi isn't some failure of deployment or a case of inability to support a large Wi-Fi rollout. There are a lot of factors: pundits argue that providing city residents with such a service would be too costly; backlash from private corporations such as McDonald's, which provide free Wi-Fi to its customers (according to a report from Mobilitie), and the usual bureaucratic red tape.

While there may be complications in providing constant, always-on Wi-Fi for a city's residents, at the very least, city governments should figure out ways to provide Wi-Fi to its residents in times of emergency. Just as there are "pop-up" retail stores during the holidays, the idea of "pop-up" Wi-Fi is plausible. Consider this statement from wireless networking vendor Ruckus Wireless.

Bombs blow things up, including access points. Typically cities, like the city of San Jose have access points deployed all over the city on light poles and buildings. These devices, like many others, are subject to terrorist attacks, no matter how well you plan your network.

That said, if one or more of these access points goes down, we implement technology called SmartMesh. This allows our APs to automatically make a long-range and highly resilient Wi-Fi backhaul connections over 5GHz Wi-Fi to another AP that is up with no human intervention. So the mesh network is effectively self-healing.

What's more, many cities, such as the City of San Jose, have created "APs on a stick." These devices can literally be deployed on demand with only power needed. Smart meshing and the smart antenna take care of everything else.

The City of San Jose was quite shrewd in their thinking about this. They've built a bunch of these things and are using them to provide pop-up retail Wi-Fi for events and other city activities. These same APs on a stick can be quickly and easily repurposed for emergency situations. Very smart.

Our technology has repeatedly been a deciding factor for cities in doing these types of things.

The technology is available. Even cloud computing can help with deploying Wi-Fi during an emergency, according to this statement from Cisco Meraki's Kiren Sekar, the head of marketing at Cisco Cloud Networking Group (Meraki was recently acquired by Cisco):

We see Wi-Fi as an effective method providing an additional connectivity and communications layer during disasters. A key technology challenge is ensuring citizens and first responders can connect without burdening resource-constrained municipal IT departments. New technologies like cloud management are making Wi-Fi easier to manage and lower operating costs, meaning that Wi-Fi is becoming a more feasible disaster-response strategy for more cities. At Cisco Meraki, we have seen our customers rapidly deploy Wi-Fi networks immediately after disasters like Hurricane Sandy and the Haitian earthquake.

Having infrastructure in place to provide Wi-Fi in the event of a disaster is crucial. So many times during crisis situations, we hear countless tales of how cell phone service got so jammed up with everyone on the system that it's rendered temporarily useless. Back-up Wi-Fi could potentially be less costly than always-available Wi-Fi and cities could create jobs with local governments hiring workers dedicated to maintaining, testing, and managing these contingent wireless networks.

What You Can Do In the Meantime

With many people scrambling for information in Boston, social media was afire with advice for private citizens to disable security on their wireless routers so others seeking information via the Internet could have connectivity.

While the appeal is well-intended, Belkin/Linksys had some advice for those considering it.

We understand that when events such as what just occurred in Boston take place, it is in our human nature to find ways to help others.

If you are considering opening up your home network to public access to allow persons impacted by an event such as this to communicate with family and friends via free Wi-Fi, we would suggest you do so by offering public access only through a “guest network” (which is a feature available in Linksys E and EA Series routers and Belkin’s dual-band routers), and separate from your “home network”. Specifically, a guest network runs alongside your personal home network and simply provides access to Wi-Fi and the internet, allowing you to share access with others while still ensuring the security of your home network.

Netgear offered similar advice:

All of our current Netgear routers have guest networks. In an emergency, you can turn on your guest network and turn off security, and that way anyone within range can get online to get in touch with family and friends. Your own network is secure, but you’re bringing internet access nearby to those in need.

And if your DSL or cable goes out, Netgear has an LTE router (MBR1515) which can connect you to the internet using Verizon’s LTE network, and it also has guest networks.

Most of the wireless routers I've tested in the last three years do offer guest access. So in the meantime, you can set up guest access and enable it to broadcast during an emergency—it's often as easy as just clicking a checkbox in the router's management interface. This is one way you can help in a horrible situation like we witnessed in Boston where so many of us feel helpless and at least until cities can come up with emergency Wi-Fi strategies.

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