WELLFLEET — Most beachgoers at Lecount Hollow on a Sunday morning in late August didn’t know that if they pulled out their phones they would find Wi-Fi waiting for them with the name “Wellfleet Public.”

The public network, promising free high-speed access to email, social media, and streaming services, became available from the comfort of internet surfers’ folding chairs at that town beach on Aug. 20. It was the first installment in a project that will bring internet access to three beaches along Wellfleet’s backshore. White Crest is scheduled to come online next and, after Labor Day, so will Cahoon Hollow, said Steven Kopits, vice chair of the cable internet and cellular service advisory committee.

With approval from the select board and town administration, the committee has been working for a year to bring fiber-optic cables along Long Pond Road to reach the beaches on Ocean View Drive in the name of shark safety.

Cell service is famously hard to come by on Wellfleet’s ocean beaches, a reality that proponents of the Wi-Fi project say could cause life-or-death delays in emergency responses. When Arthur Medici died in a shark attack in 2018, a first responder had to run up the dune to get spotty cell service and call 911, Wellfleet Police Chief Kevin LaRocco told the Independent in April.

Following that incident, the town installed emergency call boxes at all four of its ocean beaches that automatically call 911 when they are picked up, but that did not satisfy the committee.

The Wi-Fi project was funded with a $200,000 state grant plus $55,000 in free cash allocated at last spring’s town meeting. Newcomb Hollow, where Medici died, was not included in this phase of the project, but the committee plans to go back to the state to ask for more funding to do that, Kopits told the select board on Aug. 6.

A test of the Wi-Fi at Lecount Hollow on this reporter’s phone found reliable service and quick access to Netflix. Kopits told the Independent that the internet receivers provide coverage 1,700 feet from the parking lot. “Coverage should extend well into the water, providing surfers connectivity,” he said. He added that coverage can be affected by weather: on foggy or rainy days, internet speeds may be slower.

While town officials have lauded the volunteer board’s success in bringing service to the beaches this summer, reactions on the sand were decidedly mixed.

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” said Peter Przygocki, who grew up in Wellfleet and now lives in Eastham. “It gives kids another option to sit on their phones.” Przygocki added that while shark safety is important the chances of an attack are “one in a million.”

Calvin Kwaak and Abby Farrell were surfing at Lecount after working a shift on the beach as lifeguards. They both said they were against Wi-Fi. “I’m a big no,” Kwaak said.

“The local people here are big against it,” added Farrell. “It takes away from our ‘hobo-ness’ here to the point where we get angsty about it.”

Others saw it as a welcome addition. Nancy Cordell, who spends the summer here with her family, arrived at the beach with her sons, who were there to surf. She was glad about the Wi-Fi. She thought that if something happened on the beach, there was “no way of communicating with the outside world.”

Jenny Leyton, a local surfer who grew up here, believed that cell service on the beaches is a safety issue but providing it was also a loss. “A fun part of growing up here was telling your friends, ‘We’re going to the beach, come and find me,’ ” Leyton said. She hopes beachgoers will simply put away their phones.

But the awareness that one has internet access is enough to make that difficult to ignore, said visitor Erin Lasker. Lasker was taking a phone call as a reporter approached her. “I would love people to just enjoy the beach,” she said. “I know I’m a hypocrite, because I was just on my phone. That’s the nice part of not having service — you don’t have the option of being on your phone.”

A look around the beach showed little indication that much had changed: sandcastles were still being built, families still chatted beneath their umbrellas, sunbathers napped, and only an occasional adult could be seen peering at a phone through sunglasses.

 

A Bid for ‘Beach Cams’

With the Wi-Fi part of the project nearly done, Kopits went back to the select board on Aug. 6 for more. This time he didn’t represent the committee, he told the board, but was asking for approval to seek funding for cameras on the beaches.

His idea, he said, is to install “beach cams” on the poles along with the Wi-Fi routers. Their purpose would be to serve as monitors for those who want a parking space at the beach but don’t want to wait in line. “Parking at the beaches is a hassle,” Kopits said. “Cameras allow the public to see what the actual conditions are. These kinds of tools enable us to make the best and most efficient use of scarce resources.”

Kopits said that adding cameras to the beaches would make the state more likely to fund the town’s Wi-Fi expansion to Newcomb Hollow.

According to Kopits, a vacation in Wellfleet costs $120 “for a usable hour.” Thus, waiting in line for 10 minutes, Kopits said, costs $20. “By my estimates we are spending about three to four hundred thousand dollars standing in line waiting for beaches collectively in a year,” he said. “Cameras could reduce that by about half.”

Kopits also pitched a phone application for viewing the beach cams and other Wellfleet services. “You could do your reservations from there, you can send out notifications about restaurants, events, shark notifications, and sales and marketing channels for OysterFest,” Kopits said. In other words: a Wellfleet app.

“The number of downloads I would anticipate would be 20,000 to 50,000 over two or three years,” he told the board.

Kopits, who ran unsuccessfully for select board last spring, said he had been working on adding cameras to the project outside of cable advisory committee time because “no one actually ever said no.”

In fact, the committee held a tense meeting in April after former chair Josh Yeston reviewed a grant application Kopits was working on that included cameras despite the group having decided against it.

Heather Doyle, another member of the committee, spoke against Kopits’s efforts at an Aug. 6 select board meeting. “I feel tremendously disrespected by how some of the things have gone in the committee,” Doyle said. “We have clearly overprovisioned these towers for what I would say is a secret agenda, which has been paid for on the back of this grant.”

The select board swiftly voted against Kopits’s bid. “We’ve been flooded with emails by people who do not seem to feel the least bit deprived by not having cameras at the beaches,” said chair John Wolf. “I have yet to see an email in support of it.”

Community Development Director Suzanne Grout Thomas said that Kopits’s plans were “the antithesis of what Wellfleet represents.”

Dana Franchitto, who was busy manning the entrance to Lecount Hollow, agreed with Thomas. “I prefer wildness over convenience,” he said.