Building the Wireless Infrastructure : Alternative Models

Despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of central planning, Wi-Fi is fast reaching ‘infrastructure’ scale: Almost unknown three years ago, about 26.5 million WiFi capable devices were sold in 2002 alone, and have been deployed by a multitude of individuals and organizations. Historically, decentralized network segments based on new technologies often served initially to extend previous generation infrastructure, and then eventually expanded to become the dominant infrastructure. Will this be true of WiFi as well? To be sure, not all Wi-Fi deployment is decentralized. Several industrial actors, among them the incumbent telephone companies, are proceeding in a centralized and systematic fashion. Next to them however, a growing number of grass-roots organizations, non-profits, and local governments are deploying local extensions to the existing Internet infrastructure. And an emerging category of consolidators attempt to offer users unified access to these disparate infrastructures. To date however, most Wi-Fi deployment has simply amounted to the addition of “wireless tails”, last-mile extensions to the existing Internet infrastructure. In the future however, one can imagine scenarios under which these uncoordinated initiatives coalesce into a new infrastructure, perhaps one based on mesh networking. This paper reviews current efforts to deploy Wi-Fi infrastructure, along three key dimensions: architecture, coordination, and control. It situates them within a broad theoretical framework describing the evolution of information infrastructures. The framework builds on several core concepts, including the tension between centralized and decentralized deployment efforts, the historical patterns of infrastructure deployment and substitution, the role of users in shaping the evolution of technology, and the co-evolution of usage and technical systems.