By Bill McAllister
Surfers gathered at Overlook Beach in Babylon on Thursday, but they weren’t navigating waves. Sitting on the second story of the picnic pavilion and looking out at the water, Babylon Town Supervisor Steve Bellone did some Googling, inaugurating the new wireless Internet installation.
Similar WiFi hotspots have been installed at Cedar, Tanner, and Venetian Beaches as well as all town marinas and will eventually be available in all pools, beaches, and parks in Babylon. The Internet is provided at no charge to anyone within the 750-foot range of the access point.
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The Town of Babylon is the first municipality on the East Coast to offer this kind of service, although many have tried in the past. “Municipal WiFi is not impossible and can be done when taking the right approach,” according to Henry Quintin, President of Sky-Packets, the company that designed the setup and supplied the hardware.
New York City experimented with free WiFi in its parks but discontinued service in January. Philadelphia was forced to drop its plans for city-wide wireless Internet due to the prohibitive cost. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is exploring a proposal to install WiFi on commuter trains and offers WiFi access in Penn Station as a pilot program. Nassau and Suffolk county officials also proposed offering free WiFi across Long Island, but the idea has stagnated since Cablevision currently offers wireless Internet across LI, although it can only be used by Optimum Online subscribers.
The cost to install the WiFi hotspots totaled $75,000, an amount that Supervisor Bellone considered extraordinarily inexpensive and he attributed to having the installation work done by the Town’s electrical services division instead of an outside contractor.
“Funding for this WiFi initiative is not costing our town taxpayers [for the installation] a dime… because it’s coming out of a federal grant,” Bellone added. The grant provides funding for security cameras which in this case utilize wireless internet to relay video.
The implementation of the WiFi network required sending wireless signals across the Great South Bay, the body of water that separates Jones Beach Island from Long Island, rather than running cables across the bay’s floor. Both Bellone and Quintin expressed particular pride in the resulting availability of internet access across much the bay’s four-mile width.
For those not miles out on the bay, the town has partnered with local restaurant chain The Beach Hut to provide laptops that may be borrowed for free. The Overlook Beach location has three brand new Hewlett-Packard laptops that are available 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. for an hour at a time, and similar setups can be found at all four Babylon Town beaches.
