HiHillsboro Wifi Online: City Council

HILLSBORO, OR — Hillsboro's push for a connected city took another step forward Tuesday night when the city council announced the launch of the HiHillsboro Wifi network, a city-provided free wifi connection for residents and visitors to the city's downtown area.

Between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. every day of the week, roughly 3,000 smartphones, tablets, and/or laptops can now access the internet without a cellular data connection at specific hotspots throughout downtown.

"Downtown Hillsboro is the heart of our community and a key gathering place,” Hillsboro City Manager Michael Brown said in a statement. “As part of the council’s priority to continue downtown’s revitalization, the HiHillsboro WiFi network is another way that we are enhancing the downtown experience — making it more enjoyable, more equitable, and more connected."

According to city officials, the new wifi network is actually more of an expansion of services Hillsboro already offered, such as the free wifi connection at Civic Center Plaza that's been available since 2005, and the free wifi available at Hillsboro Stadium and Ron Tonkin Field in the Gordon Faber Recreation Complex.

Now the city's free wifi can be accessed anywhere between First and Sixth avenues, west to east, and Northeast Lincoln and Southeast Washington streets, north to south — an area covering 10 city blocks that includes the Walters Cultural Arts Center and the Hillsboro Central/SE Third TriMet MAX Station, as well as several restaurants and retail businesses.

Specifically, up to 2,500 users at any given moment can reportedly access HiHillsboro Wifi from the Civic Center Plaza, and up to 500 users can access the network from other spots in the downtown coverage area.

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The free wifi network expansion announcement comes while the city continues to investigate how to establish a city-wide internet network as a public utility, like Independence and Monmouth's cooperative MINET (Monmouth-Independence Network).

For more than a decade MINET has been the source for internet, phone, and television services for the combined 20,000+ residents of Monmouth and Independence. Hillsboro, however, has more than 100,000 residents and more than 50,000 people who travel to the city for work every day — which slightly increases the scale of the endeavor.

HiHillsboro Wifi, though it's not citywide yet, is at the very least a step toward that overall goal. Plus it's free.

“HiHillsboro WiFi provides connectivity right now for our community, and it lays the foundation for future Smart City opportunities to improve our quality of life by effectively and efficiently utilizing data, technology, and innovation,” Hillsboro Information Services Manager John Taylor said.

Going forward, the city reportedly plans to bring its free wifi network to Shute Park by summer 2019.

For more information on this and other city projects, visit Hillsboro-Oregon.gov.

Image via Travis Loose/Patch