Wi-Fi for the Masses

Tropos Networks aims to bring the high-speed internet to everyone. Here's how the company is doing it--one city at a time.

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It looks like a large Styrofoam takeout container. The 14-pound box would fit into a backpack were it not for the two antennas, set well apart. It can withstand subfreezing temperatures and 165-mph winds; it's even lightningproof. With the lid bolted down tightly, the box offers no clue as to what's inside. But disassembled, it reveals intricate innards that look like nothing so much as a city viewed from a plane: A million tiny wires crisscross like streets and weave among square parks the size of your thumbnail.

The magic of the box occurs when you mount it on the horizontal arm of a city lamppost, so that its long ears reach up to the sky. Install 30 of them per square mile (which isn't hard, since an installer using a single tool can put up a unit in 15 minutes) and they immediately begin communicating with one another via radio waves. Data, the same information that flows through the wired Internet, begins traveling between them. Establish some hub connections to usher the data back onto the Net and you've created a wireless network that can transmit signals all over real, life-size cities--into parks, schools, juice joints, bars, offices, playgrounds, and homes.

The boxes, known as routers or nodes, are made by Tropos Networks, a Silicon Valley upstart that's landed in the middle of a burgeoning movement among U.S. cities to create municipal wireless networks, or metroscale Wi-Fi--essentially, an effort to deliver wireless bandwidth to the masses. Since Tropos began selling its equipment in 2002, dozens of municipalities have signed up. The Twin Cities suburb of Chaska, Minnesota, built a wireless network to cover its 16 square miles and serve all 18,000 of its residents. Corpus Christi, Texas, bought 300 Tropos nodes to cover 24 square miles and has since decided to expand to 147 square miles. As it rebuilds in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans plans to cover the whole town with a Tropos network. This summer, Anaheim, California, will hit the switch, giving 325,000 citizens across 50 square miles ubiquitous broadband Internet access. Tropos-powered networks also are in the offing in Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Launched with what Bill Gurley, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early Tropos investor, calls "four guys under 30 and an algorithm," the Sunnyvale-based company spent less than $3 million getting its first product to market. Since then, it has grown into the leading equipment provider in this incipient market, with more than $15 million in revenue in 2005 and a projected $45 million in 2006. It has had roughly 350 customers to date--including some in far-flung locales such as Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Doha, Qatar--and partnerships with EarthLink, Google, Motorola, IBM, and others. Given its recent contracts, the company is well ahead of competing equipment makers.

Yet Tropos faces some difficult tests before it can realize its vision. The new, large-scale projects in San Francisco and Philadelphia will get the technology out of dress rehearsal and in front of a major audience. These launches will be key to the company's fate. As hundreds of other cities look on, contemplating whether to install their own cheap broadband, and as a phalanx of massive data carriers like Verizon and Comcast glower over what may be a new threat, Tropos will march out onstage. Says CEO Ron Sege: "The best thing we can do is make sure the big cities do well, for everyone to say, 'Oh, my God, it works."

"What Stops the Internet From Being Everywhere?"

In San Francisco, there is a new café every year that has "the best coffee in town." At the moment, it's Ritual, a chic place in the Mission District with leather couches, wireless Internet, and PowerBooks on every table. The two founding engineers of Tropos--Narasimha Chari, who goes by "Chari," and Devabhaktuni "Sri" Srikrishna--are sitting at a small table, drinking lattes and reflecting on recent news. About a year ago, the mayor of San Francisco put out a request for proposals, looking for the optimum plan for "unwiring" the city--that is, for creating a citywide Wi-Fi network. Just the day before, out of a half-dozen contenders, the selection had been announced--and Sri and Chari's list of big wins had gotten one municipal contract longer.

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