…and it don’t look so good.

At tonight’s monthly meeting of the Personal Telco Project, two PTP members unveiled the preliminary results of their independent evaluation of the city’s Unwire PDX program—the proposed citywide wifi blanket being rolled out by California-based company MetroFi.

After a good 45 minutes of methodological explanations and technical jargon, Russell Senior and Caleb Phillips unveiled their findings: In the first-phase, “proof of concept” area (downtown and central city), they found that MetroFi’s network worked about half the time.

Russell Senior and Caleb Phillips with their testing contraption, photo by Sam Churchill of dailywireless.org

According to the bid the city granted to the company, MetroFi has to show at least 90 percent coverage in the test area—but only outdoors—to continue on with the rest of the city. Even if you’re not a tech geek, you can probably do the math on that one. There’s more explanation after the jump.

There are currently 72 active MetroFi access nodes (you've probably seen them above utility poles)--the nodes are supposed to broadcast a signal in either a 500-foot or 1,000-foot radius, depending on who you ask. So Senior and Phillips--who lost a bid to do the Unwire evaluation, but opted to do testing for free anyway--chose a number of spots within those fields, randomly selected by GIS software, and hauled around a testing device that resembled a coat rack loaded down with receiving gear--the perfect combination of high and low tech.

Of 39 random spots placed within 500 feet of access nodes, they were able to connect 20 times, and failed 19 times. When they tested between the 500- and 1,000-foot zone, they were only able to connect 12 times, failing 27 times. Overall, that's a failure rate of about 60 percent.

Yipes!

The results are still preliminary--Senior and Phillips will release a full analysis later. Meanwhile, a separate firm, Boulder, Colorado-based firm Uptown Services, is expected to unveil the results of its own evaluation by April 12, according to the city's Unwire manager, Logan Kleier. Comparing their findings to Senior and Phillips' should be interesting.

Anecdotally, the general rule for Unwire access appears to be "if you can see an access node, you have a chance of connecting; if you can't see the hardware, you're probably out of luck."

Of course, this is all testing outdoors only--and who in Portland uses their laptop outdoors, on the sidewalk? Once you go indoors, unless you're at a window near an access point, you're unlikely to get a signal unless you have additional boosting hardware.

That belies the city's stated goal of providing internet access to people and families who can't otherwise afford it. Michael Burmeister-Brown might have another solution.

Burmeister-Brown, who spoke at the PTP meeting, is one of the co-founders of Net Equality, which installs wireless networks in low-income housing complexes. Instead of building the network from the outside-in, the way MetroFi works, Net Equality installs wifi routers inside of the complexes. That way, the internet signals only have to penetrate through interior apartment walls, and not external concrete walls and weatherproof glass.