Wi-fi is growing in urban and city centers

HERMISTON, Ore. — Here in an area spanning 700 square miles, the site of a vast wireless Internet cloud, farmer Bob Hale can prop open a laptop among the scrub brush and check his e-mail.

He can also check the moisture level of his onion field while sitting inside his air-conditioned truck.

And as the jackrabbits run by, he can watch CNN online or play a video game among the tumbleweeds. Or he can turn on the irrigation sprinklers with a keystroke, or turn them off.

While some of the country's largest cities struggle to offer cheap Wi-Fi access, one of the least populated counties in the nation has created what is billed as the world's largest hotspot, a wireless cloud that stretches over a landscape so dry and desolate it could have been lifted from a cowboy tune.

Similar wireless projects have been stymied in major metropolitan hubs such as Philadelphia by opposition from telephone giants, who have poured money into legislative bills aimed at curbing low-cost municipal Wi-Fi.

But here among the thistle, wireless entrepreneur Fred Ziari faced no resistance from the large providers — who see little gain in such a sparsely populated market — allowing him to quickly build the $5 million cloud at his own expense.

While his service is free to the general public, Ziari is financing the setup cost through contracts with more than 30 city and county agencies and with big farms, such as Hale's, whose onion empire supplies over two-thirds of the red onions used by the Subway franchise. Morrow County, for instance, pays Ziari around $180,000 per year.

"Outside the cloud, I can't even get DSL," said Hale. "When I'm inside it, I can take a picture of one of my onions, plug it into my laptop and send it to the Subway guys in San Diego and say, 'Here's a picture of my crop,' " he said.

Even as hotspots are mushrooming, with 72,140 now registered globally, only a handful of cities have managed to blanket their entire urban core. Cities from San Francisco to Chaska, Minn., to St. Cloud, Fla., have announced plans to put their communities under a wireless tarp — but only Ziari appears to have pinned down such a large area.

Asked why other municipalities have had a harder time succeeding, the engineer replies: "Politics."

"If we get a go-ahead we can do a fairly good-sized city in a month or two," said Ziari, who immigrated to the United States from the tiny Iranian town of Shahi on the Caspian Sea. "The problem is getting the go-ahead."