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TECHNOLOGY
‘Look Ma, no wires’ at the BPL
BY DAN KENNEDY

There he was, the very picture of the modern-day knowledge worker. A fashionably tiny cell phone with an extension wire and mouthpiece dangling from his left ear. A Compaq Presario laptop. And an IEEE 802.11b wireless Ethernet card (that’s WiFi to you, pal) plugged into one of the open slots, giving him ultra-fast access to the Internet.

The only surprise was where he was sitting: at a table just outside Bates Hall at the Boston Public Library.

In fact, Richard (he wouldn’t give me his last name) is on the cutting edge of one of the BPL’s newest services. On December 10, the library switched on a WiFi network at the central library and at each of its 27 branches. Now, anyone with a WiFi-enabled laptop can come in and surf for free. You don’t even need so much as an Internet account, since the library’s gateway takes care of that for you.

Richard, an independent consultant from the South End, was doing some volunteer work for a squash league to which he belongs. He’s been taking advantage of the BPL’s wireless access for the past few weeks. " It’s kind of nice to come here in a different environment and get away from all the usual phone calls, " he told me. Curiosity-seekers, though, are another story. Even as I was bugging him, another laptop user was peppering him with questions.

The network offers unrestricted access in common areas of the libraries and filtered access in those used by children and teenagers, says Carolyn Coulter, the BPL’s systems manager. The cost, according to BPL spokeswoman Cate Zannino, was $195,200, with 90 percent of that coming from the federal government through the E-rate telecommunications tax, which is administered by the Federal Communications Commission and paid out according to a formula based on what percentage of a community’s schoolchildren take part in the subsidized-lunch program. (The FCC did not return a call seeking comment.)

Cool though the WiFi network may be, it might strike some as weirdly inappropriate that federal money based on the percentage of low-income children in the area is being used to subsidize those who can afford laptop computers and WiFi cards. But Coulter and Zannino note that WiFi is actually a big money-saver for the library, since it is able to network its own employees without laying expensive leased cables everywhere. In addition, if affluent library patrons bring their own Internet access, it means there will be more public Internet terminals available for those who don’t own computers.

So how popular is the service? " We’re getting some feedback on this, " says Coulter, especially from the central library and the Allston branch. But she adds: " I really don’t have any way currently to gauge how many people are on it. I’d like to get an idea of how much usage we’re getting. "

Sadly, Macintosh users are left out in the cold, second-class status to which they have become accustomed. But that may be changing, too. Zannino and Coulter sent me a link on how to hook up a Mac with an Airport card (Apple-ese for WiFi). And Coulter says that as soon as the bugs are worked out, Mac instructions will be posted on the BPL’s Web site, along with the ones that are already there for Windows.

For more information on the BPL’s wireless network, go to www.bpl.org/general/wireless.htm

Issue Date: March 6 - 13, 2003
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