City looking to provide downtown wi-fi service

One of the many things a city can do to help its businesses during tough times is revisiting infrastructure, says Tom Thielman, Willoughby’s community development manager.

“We improved Erie Street, we made some modernization to our street scape plan and now we’re looking at our trees with the LED lights,” he said. “We’re looking to upgrade that in the future.”

Thielman recalls when the novel coronavirus first hit and the first set of shutdowns were taking place — a time when the city was in the midst of a major sewer project downtown.

“Something that almost seems a distant past already,” Thielman said.

“We were replacing a 100-year-old water line and a 75-year-old water line down the center of Erie Street,” he added.

“It probably came at a perfect time because that project was able to zip along unfettered without any problems. We had that whole street tore up. I think we were done by July 4 — paved and ready.”

Mayor Robert Fiala said Willoughby is also in the midst of implementing a downtown wi-fi service, which will allow the city to have an app.

“That will allow for anybody to come downtown, enjoy downtown and immediately know where things are and what’s happening,” Fiala said.

“We’re in the middle of that effort and we think it’s going to be an important part of our downtown.”

Although the process could take until spring or summer of this year, information that can be collected from downtown wifi can be used for a host of things such as traffic and the number of people downtown, he said.

“There’s very powerful geospatial information we can start to apply,” the mayor said. “We’re actually looking at some other marketing tools that will help us tell who shops here, where they’re from and when they shop here.

“We have a large softball tournament in the middle of summer. A family could be down there saying, ‘We’re hungry,’ so now we have a tool for them to connect to downtown merchants, restaurants and bars.”

The city is making a significant investment in providing free wi-fi downtown and creating the citywide app that will be focused on travel and tourism, the restaurant industry and local merchants, Thielman said.

Ohio cities such as Medina, Hudson and Dublin have done things with running their own fiber network and creating an app, but locally it’s not common.

“Sometimes, geographically, it doesn’t work,” Thielman said.

“The idea is to give good coverage throughout downtown and expand that coverage into Todd Field, so we have summertime baseball players down there and they’ll have good wi-fi capabilities. When they come to our app, it’s going to pop up.”

Another benefit that can come along with downtown wi-fi is the blanket of security it can provide, Thielman said.

“We’re thinking about installing a couple of cameras for security, especially on our side streets,” he said. “We could maybe monitor the river levels with a live camera for fishermen to look at.”

After studying a mesh network that links wirelessly, the city realized that some hardwiring of fiber will have to be done, Thielman said.

“I think we could launch in the summer,” he said.

“We got to run some dark fiber from point A, B and C so we’ll have stronger, more robust signal. We have to get that infrastructure in place, but in the meantime, we’re working on the development of the app and we could start a small network.”