By Nigel Parry

In July, Verizon launched a new hotspot that makes one gigabit (125MB per second) mobile hotspot connections available in Lowertown, Saint Paul.

With an outright purchase of the Verizon 5G MiFi® M1000 Hotspot together with a 2-year data plan, customers will pay $111 a month for 24 months. After that, continuing the monthly data plan costs $90.

For local organizations and artists who have attempted to livestream events or incorporate video conferencing in events, this news opens up a host of new possibilities. The hotspot also allows for guest access, making it simple to provide Internet access at large events.

Live Streaming entered the public consciousness during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, when activists armed with video cameras, laptops, and Internet hotspots or mobile phones with data plans shared events in real time from on the ground. I was day producer for the main team live streaming from Zuccotti Park in New York City, Global Revolution. The minimum number of streams on GR’s live broadcast at any time was around 8,000 on one Sunday morning. The maximum number I saw was during the Brooklyn Bridge Mass Arrest on October 1st, 2011, when over 23,000 streams were being served to a global audience watching the events unfold. In the end, Occupy spread to over 1,000 cities worldwide.

Occupy Pittsburgh media team member Don Carpenter live streaming in Downtown Pittsburgh. (Photo: Tom Jefferson)

In the eight years since Occupy, technology and the nation’s physical Internet infrastructure have surged forward in leaps and bounds, to the point where this latest Verizon offering allows for live streaming of multiple Ultra High Definition streams (four times the resolution of regular HD) from a single MiFi M1000 hotspot. The minimum required upload bandwidth for 1080p (HD) streaming is 5 Mbps, while the minimum 4K (UHD) streaming bandwidth is around 25 Mbps.

With livestreams embeddable ahead of time in websites and shareable via social media buffering applications, the potential for reaching and building nonlocal audiences during events is there, and the mobility of hotspots cuts down on the need for careful venue choice and extensive pre-testing when holding events that require fast Internet access.

Things can get horribly complicated and technical problems during an event you are organizing are the last thing you want to be dealing with. I co-presented a livestreaming training workshop at the 2012 Allied Media Conference in Detroit. The conference organizers unwittingly put us in a concrete basement classroom, inoculated from the conference’s own wifi network, where even mobile phones couldn’t make or receive calls. A hotspot like the MiFi M1000 could have been placed at the top of the stairs, with an Ethernet cable running down to a router, bringing that connectivity into the room.

Back of the Verizon 5G MiFi M1000 Hotspot, showing its LED display.

Having truly powerful mobile hotspots opens up a variety of artistic and activist opportunities for outdoor projection of videos and animations.

With one gigabit mobile Internet now possible in Lowertown, art crawls and other large public events in the neighborhood can become canvases for multimedia artists, and local organizations and venues are in a realistic position to bring an Internet audience into their events.

Nigel Parry is a journalist, communications professional, and musician who has lived and worked in Lowertown since 2001. His business website can be found at nigelparry.net.