Riverside’s Downtown Mall to go “Wireless”
Imagine sitting on the Downtown Riverside Main Street Pedestrian Mall and being able to access the Internet, at high speeds, from your laptop computer or PDA, while you enjoy lunch or a coffee break. This is the vision of SmartRiverside (formerly Riverside Community Online), a local non-profit that aims to improve the quality of life for those who choose to live, work, and play in Riverside.
“The concept is a simple one,” says Toby Holmes, Executive Director of SmartRiverside. “We want to create a more technologically-inviting atmosphere downtown…where a local worker, professional, conventioneer, local college student, or juror can access the Internet while sitting outside. The hope is that such an amenity will draw more people downtown to do business, shop, or just enjoy the area.”
The planning of the Downtown Wireless Mall Initiative, as it is known, is taking final form. A subcommittee of the SmartRiverside Board of Directors, headed by George Hoanzl of Jaguar Computers and John Tillquist of the UCR Anderson Graduate School of Management, has been researching various models to employ in the Downtown district. They are close to completion of that process, and hope to have a plan finalized by the beginning of April, and to complete implementation of the network by June.
“As SmartRiverside is a community-based entity, our hope from the beginning was to create a network where the Internet access is free to the user. We believe that model will create the most usage and therefore have the broadest impact on the environment downtown,” Holmes said. Various companies now offer such wireless Internet access in locations around the country, but most charge the user to get access.
Ideally, the Downtown Wireless Mall would work differently. Any user with a laptop computer or PDA (such as a Palm Pilot) would be able to access the Internet for free, from various locations up and down the Main Street Mall.
Numerous stakeholders in the downtown have already shown support for the project, including the City of Riverside, the Superior Courts of Riverside, Riverside Downtown Partnership, The Mission Inn, I/O Software, as well as the Chamber.
SmartRiverside believes this network will help the City of Riverside differentiate itself from other nearby communities. “Riverside can send a message to companies, particularly technology firms, that we are interested in creating an environment that is attractive to their workforce and to the community as a whole.”
If successful, the plan is to roll out similar networks, under a project entitled AccessRiverside, which would be linked to the downtown network, at other locations around Riverside, including University Village and the Galleria at Tyler.