Cloud Dissipating – WAGZone Gone

Sunday’s Athens Banner Herald ran a story on the discontinuation of the WAGZone (Wireless Athens Georgia Zone) – and they got it almost all right. “Life without the 'cloud'” http://tinyurl.com/6et9u9. The WAGZone was a wireless cloud over downtown Athens designed to allow anyone to access the internet from the outdoor spaces. When we built it in 2002, Intel proclaimed it “the world’s first municipal wireless service” and it was featured on CNN a bunch. Although the NMI built the WAGZone, the true hero in this techno-story is the government of Athens. Hey, anyone with a little bit of money who can read documentation can create a wifi zone. What made the WAGZone fly was the support of the Athens/Clarke County Unified Government. Then Mayor Doc Eldridge and now Mayor Heidi Davison both went out on a limb committing the use of poles, electricity, and maintenance workers. Municipal wireless networks all over the country are failing because they don’t have the type of progressive aggressive leadership we have in Athens.

For the NMI, the WAGZone was always an experiment. We were never interested in the technology itself, we wanted to explore what people would do with untethered content. We built wireless walking tours, automated photography systems (ArchCam was totally cool), and a radio station that you could listen to on your computer. With the lessons that we learned from the WAGZone, the NMI branched out into other areas of mobile media and now we work on rich media content (audio and video) delivered to cell phones.

Bottom line, the lessons of the WAGZone helped Athens and cities all over the country make decisions about how wireless can make their communities stronger. I think that will be the WAGZone’s lasting legacy.