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Chicago Proposes MAN (Metropolitan Area Network)
stumble writes: "This article lacks many details, but the idea is that Chicago wants to bring broadband to the masses and is accepting proposals to design and build a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN): 'The project, called CivicNet, is aimed at bringing a broadband network with integrated data, voice and video capabilities to every nook and cranny of Chicago over the next 10 years.'"
we need more of these! let's just build MAN's and link 'em with OC-48's =)
hey... gotta be better than the current setup.
One day, a corporation will bring a CAT5 line into your house, plug it in to a router, and then you will plug all your PCs into that router. Infinite bandwith!
:).
But the MAN idea sounds excellent. I hope all cities establish this system. Can they be allocated their own TLD? They practically give them out anyway
The Metropolitan Area Network: One step closer to a networked world. And cheap broadband!
Everything is mainstream now.
...like a fish needs a bicycle!
*looks at story*
*looks at Beowulf joke*
Forget it.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The big dig is turning out to be an amazing disaster. The plan was great - reroute all traffic and city planning problems underground, with very little trouble for the commuter and a more beautiful city above ground. Its the largest public works project ever.
Unfortunately, because you're dealing with politicians and contracters, both of whom love to lie to get money, the city is losing a bunch of money and the project is in terrible debt. All because of that old problem: if you ask voters whether giving out ponies to everyone is a good idea, they say "yes!", without realizing that it'll actually cost the government money.
The way everyone's been complaining about internet providers, I'm surprised it wasn't sooner. This sounds like a good idea, but let's just hope that it doesn't go the way of most other government projects: the final result is crappy, hard to use, tightly controlled, and causes a tax hike.
Then again, as underhanded as some ISP's are, Chicago would be hard pressed to do any worse.
~ now you know
We all know that the real work will be done by a woMAN right? :)
...the idea is that Chicago wants to bring broadband to the masses and is accepting proposals to design and build a MAN: 'The project, called SweetStuff, is aimed at bringing a love machine with integrated data, voice and video capabilities to every nook and cranny of Chicago over the next 10 years.'
The project, called CivicNet, is aimed at bringing a broadband network with integrated data, voice and video capabilities to every nook and cranny of Chicago over the next 10 years.
By which time, of course, the system will be hopelessly outdated, to the point where the last 40% of the people to receive it, who are not-so-coincidentally probably the ones who need it most, might as well not even have it.
OK, so maybe that's a tad bit cynical, but you get the point.
It hurts when I pee.
Chicago Proposes MAN ;)
Yeah, it's OT, but this headline reminded me of the infamous Ian Malcom line from 'Jurassic Park'...
"God creates dinosours. God destroys dinosours. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosours. Dinosours eat man... Woman inherits the Earth."
Well, that, and I'm sure someone will make a joke about Chicago being the codename for Windows 95, and how Microsoft wants to take control of the human ra... nevermind, I'm hopeless
aimed at bringing a broadband network with integrated data, voice and video capabilities to every nook and cranny of Chicago over the next 10 years.
:(
ping crack_whore1351.CivicNet
no route to host
no route to host
Drat, she's out.
I hear that the Powers That Be are working on the successor to M.A.N., tentatively called W.O.M.A.N, or Wireless Omnipresent Metropolitan Area Network. One of the last known remaining bugs is a few days a month performance is a bit tempermental, to say the least.
If M$ had their way, they'd branch off a rib of this new network and create a Windows-only MAN, or WoMAN.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I see this as the way the net is going to go. It's too much like the road and highway system rather than the electrical system or TV delivery system like cable or DSS
People go 'to and fro' on the internet and don't necessarily turn to one provider for the majority of the service like they do for other utilities. Sure you can use pay-routes to get online, (ISP's) just as you can use toll-roads and turnpikes. The most-used routes to get online will probably be supported via tax dollars in the near to medium future.
This has up and down sides. The up side is that public ownership of the internet will mean that it will be subject to more stringent quality controls and pricing regulation. The down-side is that any public resource is inevitably over-used and abused. It will also be more subject to content regulation if it's truly perceived as a 'community' resource.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The city of Alameda, CA is in the process of building its own cable network with broadband internet service. It will be available throughout the city and will compete with AT&T.
It seems to me that broadband internet service is important enough to quality of life that it is proper for a city to ensure that it becomes as available, as cheap, and as reliable as possible.
I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned the privacy concerns that could easily evolve from this. The article didn't seem to mention what sort of Terms of Service, if any, the city has considered.
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
While I think it's great to see networking treated as a public utility, that seems like an awfully long time for a single deployment project. Unless they're planning to update their technologies over time, I don't imagine the last few people getting hooked up in 2012 will find today's broadband networking all that interesting. Would you really want your city to be rolling out 1992-era network technology this year? Of course, that's less true for really low-income families; if it's a choice between today's speeds and no connectivity at all, it's a no-brainer. And it's also perhaps the case that 10 years is the maximum time limit in the RFP; maybe bidders will propose to get the job done a lot faster. Should be an interesting one to watch, in any case, and I expect other cities will follow suit as more and more government functions migrate to the Web. In fact, it won't surprise me to see attempts to force Web-friendly cities into providing public net infrastructure; if the only way you can access a particular city service is via the city Web site, then one could make the case that the city needs to make sure all its citizens can get at the city Web site. I bet someone will file a suit to that effect at some point.
but who in a large, city government sponsored network is going to fight against throwing a couple or three carnivore's into their network anyway?
hrmm... now to think about it... who at my ISP would fight about that either?
...except that the first time someone's kid gets routed to animalsex.com or some such, they're going to sue the city. So the city's going to have to install porn filters, and do age verification, and all the other crap that schools and libraries have to put up with in order to even offer desktop-based internet access, at which point it probably won't even be worthwhile.
Not to mention having to provide tech support for an entire metropolitan area...
Or the fact that the people that can afford computers or laptops with 802.11 cards can probably afford decent DSL access anyhow.
More power to 'em if they can pull it off, but there's reasons why Ricochet didn't do so well...
what for? look like a good idea on the outside...
what will this cost the taxpayer?
what will it cost to connect?
what are they going to CENSOR?
this is a good idea, but i would rather not see a government controlling it.
it wont be long before they start filtering porn, or running carnivore on it to watch everything its users do, in the name of 'security' and 'public safety'
what they will most likely do off the bat?
filter ports and NO tellecommuting!
if this was a privately run thing, i would be all for it.
im sure the local telco and cable co. is against this. after all, its lost DSL and cable subscribers.
you have been warned....
Speaking as a former long-term inhabitant of Chicago, with some inside knowledge of its politics, I put no stock in this until it's built out and accessible to every household and business. They've been talking about it for several years, as I recall.
The Daley political machine can talk big but moves sloooowwwwly.
it will turn out like almost every other government run program. Overbudget, and late. By the time any government program mean to compete with the private sector comes to fruition, the private sector is already hard at work on the next generation version.
El mensaje primero!
Sid Meyers. Er wait, wasn't that CivNet? Whatever happened to that, anyways?
Mmmm.. playing Civnet over Civicnet. Now that's a good way to kill time in a traffick jam!
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Awww... did someone lose his/her favourite tree because the dig?
Let me tell you something. Underground is where everything involving cars, trains and cables should be. Spare no expense. In particular, get rid of those fugly asphalt trails and fields full of cars and make public transportation compulsory.
I live in Chicago. The government has trouble fixing the potholes and running the schools (it's irresponsible to send your kids to public school in Chicago), and the problems they have with corruption are incredible.
Think of what the money this will cost could do if it was sunk into open source development.
I think it would be better to lobby for government funded software development. The first thing they should do is an anti-virus package for windows that's freely available. A lot of people would bitch and moan about supporting MS, but it would sell every windows user in the world on open source.
So.. if you create your own NAN (Neighborhood Area Network), are you sticking it to the MAN?
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Well, it's great that Chicago will be wired, but I see problems with the city owning the network. Some *ahem* well-meaning civic leaders might feel the need to impose draconian policies on the network...
like trying to filter pr0n
or blocking gaming ports
or anything else the city councils feels is 'bad for the children'
I'd be more cautious than celebratory. Stinks like China.net.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I'm a single woman in Chicago, and let me tell you, if the mayor wants to make sure every woman in Chicago gets a MAN, I'm all for it! Nobody else seems to be able to do it. :-(
This reminds me of an old project called SlashNet, which aimed to bring Hemos to every nook and cranny of geeks everywhere.
The Metropolitan Planning Council has information about this project from the initial RFI's.
The Economics of Website Security
If the City of Chicago isn't careful, they will wind up granting an exclusive market to some Internet Service Provider, who will proceeded to lock-out (or charge monopoly prices for) all other Internet services.
Come on. people, we saw this same behavior with the cable companies and the cellphone providers, and the phone companies before them.
Will Chicagoans be guaranteed the same level of service regardless of which services they're using, or which web sites they're visiting?
Will Chicagoans be allowed to use other Internet Service Providers over the WAN provided?
Will they be able to select another broadband provider in the City of Chicago selected one prices too high, or offers poor service, or will this be an exclusive contract, with other providers banned from the wires, or from the market?
If they do this right, and demand that the selected provider "deliver the bits" fairly, this could make Chicage the next hub for Internet innovation. If they do thie right, they could clean-up big time.
If they do this wrong, they could lock themselves into a single-provider network and find themselves dealing with yet another Cable or Cellphone monopoly.
Time will tell.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
... that's right, thatnks to fat asses like Teddy "Yup I swam away and let her drown" Kennedy, the US taxpayers have been feeding the big dig for years now. Whee!!
Chicago already has many broadband options. Ameritech/SBC provides DSL (or another provider resells it), and there is a crazy company (RCN) that came through and re-wired thousands of buildings for their fiber to the telephone pole broadband/cable solution. AT&T "broadband" also might get around to providing data services to a meaningful population of it's Chicago subscribers sometime soon.
Most of these solutions do lack geographical reach. Good coverage is confined to the mostly affluent and gentrified portions of the city. I doubt even Ameritech, which already has a wire in most houses, has good DSL coverage in lower income areas, it just can't be a priority for them. This is where the city government can provide a much needed impetus. They can provide the motivation to provide a combination of services and locations that might be commercially marginal at best.
Of course the appearance of high speed internet cafes on the south side of Chicago might backfire on the liberal set, as they find that the locals they hoped to benefit are displaced by yuppies moving in to take advantage of all that cheap bandwidth.
-josh
It worked like this: a business with an existing Internet connection would be provided another one at a very low cost by the city. The city also provided interconnections to various local ISPs (Sprint, BBN, local ISPs). Then when the user dialed in to the local POPs in each location, each local business would be only 2 or 3 hops away. Interesting idea.
It failed. Turns out, local city businesses with the desire to operate large Internet business could care less about the access speeds of the communities in which they were located. They dispised the extra complexity the initiative forced upon them, even though part of their "backup line" costs were underwritten. And most of them felt that the government wasn't up to the task anyway. ("It took 4 months to repair the sidewalk in front of my house, and you want me to peer with you? Hah!")
The second part of the plan was to offer Internet access. But that plan was shot down by a multitude of ISPs that didn't want to compete with a city government that was intent on taxing them anyway. They went to court, and now the whole effort is a distant memory.
So although it sounds nice, having a city government -- many of whom collect sales taxes from ISPs -- competing against their tax base. Well, it never tends to work out to benefit the citizens in any meaningful way.
This is the nature of public utilities -- they are forced to install infrastructure everywhere, even in the unprofitable areas, in order to secure a monopoly franchise. But broadband is not going to be a regulated monopoly utility.
So what will this become, if anything? A city-promoted push to install broadband in profitable areas. The problem is, that broadband is already in most of those areas. So unless the city is going to cough up some money to fund building infrastructure that won't pay for itself, this probably won't go anywhere.
Incidentally, this only highlights how the process of widenening the gap between the haves and the have-nots occurs. The poor areas don't even have access to good technology, so it's harder to acquire skills in that technology, making it harder to break out of poverty, which means they stay poor, and continue to not have access to new technology, and so on.
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
Fuck,
The Love to Fuck You Guy
Well, it's a start, but as soon as governments can proove that they can hire and keep qualified, intelligent and committed people, they could do something like this even cheaper, considering that they wouldn't have to worry about making a profit. Companies do a shoddy job anyways; anyone who owns a broadband connection from a private firm knows that the whole 'the private sector has to garauntee higher services levels' argument is bullshit. Cap this with the fact that they wouldn't have to turn a profit if they built and managed most of it themselves (just the pipes mind you .. there are tons of companies that could provide the email and webspace and all that extra crap lots of people won't even use thanks to hotmail etc), and I think you'd end up with a dynamite broadband infrastructure.
It's a shame no one likes the taxes and governments anymore tho, as I realize that it'll be a cold day in the next ice age before the pendulum starts swinging back to this mentality.
"Old man yells at systemd"
The problem with these 'Over a period of x years' projects is that by the time everyone has it, there'll be another 'next big thing' or people will be needing more bandwidth for hungry apps. 10 years ago, I was on like, 14.4kbps. If they installed some sort of hypothetical 14.4kbps dedicated line to everyone's home then it'd be sorely out of date by now. If they just did it within, say, a year or 2 but 10? Any reply on this would be good.
Mod me down, fine with me, it's my real karma I try to keep up.
Elwood: We're getting the MAN back together.
I live in Chicago.. Finally (maybe?) we'll be first in something instead of playing catch-up with the rest of the country like we do in everything else.
Every crook and nanny in Chicago already has broadband! Sounds like another slush fund for "the machine" to me...
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Aside from the obvious ease of installation compared with wiring (but increasing privacy security concerns, i suppose), this would seem like a great place to lobby for wide scale rollout of wirless to the masses, especially if they want to reach that "every nook and cranny" goal".
Furthermore, it would be a great way to show how goverment funding could help advance projects like www.nycwireless.org, which are trying to do things on their own and languishing somewhat.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
an orange turns green from mold, can it still be called an orange?
Last thing Chicago needs is another toll system. I can just see it now...a little toll gate drops down on your browser every 5mb download awaiting $0.40 so you can get back out on the Information Superhighway.
I live near Chicago. Always have. This, while being a good idea on paper, probably won't be very good for a while. First off, CUB (Citizens Utility Board) will get involved and try to fuck things up, second ICC (Illinois Communications Commission) will do the same.
;-)
CUB + ICC == asinine decisions. Just this week we had to go to 11 digit dialing because they couldn't agree on provisions for an area code just for cellular devices. Bastards.
Sig missing. Reward.
check out www.smartcapital.ca for info on Ottawa's plans. I also hear that Toronto is considering something similar.
Imagine there were a municipal dark fiber network that every house and office building were connected to just like they are connected to the sewers and power grid! The home/business owner could then at their convenience connect a fiber optic router/hub and connect to whomever they like within the city/country! For instance, you could connect your fiber channel to one of the 2-5 ISPs in the city and pay for a gateway to the Internet, (probably capped to some reasonable bandwidth) or you could connect directly to your buddy's house or your other branch office at full speed!
You would be able to use 1 fiber strand, or 1 optical "channel", you could use the cheapest 10mbit fiber router or pay the big bucks for gigabit hardware! Or you could use several channels to connect to several different places at once, one 10mbit link to your ISP, one 1000mbit link to your branch office, and another 10mbit link to your home office!
it's a freaking GREAT idea!
I just wish it'd arrive sooner here in Ottawa!
I'm tired of "broad"-band, I want ethernet speeds to as much of the world as possible.
so when are they going to give equal access to WOMAN (Wireless Open Metropolitan Area Network) MAN has always Dominated WOMAN and taken all the best clients, and opressed WOMAN by not giving equal access.
(Note to moderators, this is a joke.... the feminatzi's will have a HUGE problem with calling this MAN.)
The working class folks on the South Side will no doubt be thrilled that their tax burden is subsidizing speedier porn acquisition in Lincoln Park.
[the RFP was] issued to a set of prequalified vendors...
"Prequalified" must mean they have the ability to raise the dead on election day.
"Remember, kids, this is Chicago, the most democratic city in the world...so vote early and often!"
... my first thought was "Geez, I wonder what Javascript function is throwing back the old NaN (Not a Number)... musta forgot a '+' operator..."
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
pretty much any other Technology push from the city of Chicago... Chicago has been in a technology bubble for years and loves "Buzzwords"...
Here in Michigan, our Govenor was pushing to make Broadband available to everybody. Hoping that if we get on the band wagon early it would create more jobs here. Click here to read more about it
http://www.kubuntu.org/
if ameritech rec'd bid they would intentionally drive the project into ground so as to not compete with their own dsl service. wanna talk about anti-competitive behavior? ameritech has learned some tricks from m$.
When TCI (now a part of AT&T) stalled on upgrading cable service a few years ago, Tacoma got fed up and started their own cable/broadband Internet service Click Network. Ironically, by doing that they got TCI to actually upgrade and USWest hurried along DSL in the area as well.
All Illinois is divided into two parts: Chicago and Not_Chicago.
The boundary is roughly a 25-mile radius around the Sears Tower. Those of us who dwell in the nether regions of Not_Chicago just east of St. Louis, MO can only look with longing at the urban abundance in the far north. We have abandoned all hope of ever enjoying any connectivity better than the proverbial waxed string and peach can.
but it can in no way compare to the capacity of the Chunnel!
(damn, IP banned again before Troll Tuesday!)
Does this mean that when, (and it will) the MAN expands and becomes a WOrld Metro Area Network it will be called WOMAN?
- Peace, Love and Guavafruit
The city also came up with a new plan entitled, "hand out of lots of cash to everyone." The plan puts large piles of cash in the hands of anyone who lives in the city. The city doesn't intend to fund the project, rather leave such minor details to the private sector.
Someone you trust is one of us.
The city isn't planning to become the only ISP and make all others illegal, now are they?
I actually am a product of the Chicago Public School system and while I'm appalled at this proposal, I'm not surprised. I went to one of the best public high schools in the city but there were guns found on a monthly basis, metal detectors, gang members, security guard/student relationships, and I sat next to a kid in driver's-ed who had a 0.0 GPA. How I got to where I am today is a wonder.
Anyway, King Richie has consistently ignored the state of the school system in favor of putting plastic covers on rotting infrastructure and projects like the ridiculous Millennium Park. This is just another example of Dailey junior throwing money to his mobbed up pals on projects that should never have started.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Just train some of the people who elected mayor Daley to maintain the network for minimum wage...after all, corpses don't have a lot of living expenses.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
You don't Honestly believe the bile from the Right-wing sites like world net and NEWSMAX, do you? Grow up and learn to start Living and Stop Hating.
An article by Michael J. DeMaria over at networkcomputing.com.
it's better to try and fail than fail to try.
I submitted this story about my home City, Kingston upon Hull in the UK, which announced similar project over a year ago.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsi
This system is already installed in 10,000 of the 30K homes in the City. Supports High Speed internet, Interactive Digital Television, Video on Demand, Council/Health and Educational Services.
More US bias from Slashdots ?
End users are still responsible for getting something to plug their APs into, but it defers most of the cost of the MAN to the people who want to participate. Plus, it's a technology that's here today and works.
Yes, there are concerns about theft and network security, but if you're smart enough to consider these, then you're probably smart enough to offer a solution. I can think of a few.
*trenton
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
So if I email my order to the pizza place down the block using this new network, will my pizza get cooked any faster?
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
"SEX MAN ANUS" are the le TteR s y O u have seem to have bo L ded. You are such a... We L l, you ought to figure it out sometime.
Liquid(TJ) writes:
Why would you assume that in the future people will choose to move to RF instead of wired connectivity?
Is the future somehow going to magically eliminate the problem of interference, the security concerns, the waste of omnidirectional broadcasting, the concerns about the side-effects of pumping radio waves into the environment?
I agree that it is unlikely that ten years from now we will be using copper wires. But, barring the development of stable wormholes or quantum tunneling or other such 'magic', I'm pretty damn sure the connectivity will be via some physical link, perhaps a vastly improved fiberoptic.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Hey ho, let's stick it to the Man!
How long before the government controls the PAYLOAD of your packets as well as their source and destination? And where in the Constitution does it say that "cities shall be in the communications business" ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Being from Calif, I can tell you how bad things get when the government oversees the utilities. Look they've screwed up the spectrum market, the phone market(no local competition), the gas market, the electiricty market(nearly ran it into bankruptcy), even the trash(no competition) and sewage (overspills) and transportation(gridlock) markets. PLEEEEEASE do not let them screw up the internet anymore than they already have.
Also, who'se to say that if they oversee connectivity into every home, that they also wont start regulating inappropiate content. NO. We all know the political pressures they're under. Lets just avoid the whole problem and not go there. Were not talking about enlightened researchers anymore like with ARPANET, no it would be run by purebread bureauocrats. God only knows how they'd screw it up. Since we can do it without the gov, we would be raving lunatics to put our balls in their hands. no no no and no!
I used to live in Tacoma Wa and the city has it's own city owned cable tv system. So it souldn't be to hard for them to institue a similar program much faster. Any one have info on any plans to do this?
The tiny little Capitol of Australia, Canberra, has for the past few years investing in a project called TransACT which promises to link the entire city with a state of the art fiber / copper network (basically fiber to the curb) with an atm (like) network actually running down the cables. The company is not selling content themselves leaving it up to others to acutally provide services like pay TV (which *still* hasn't really taken of in OZ) or all the other fun services you can send over a nice fast network (internet, movies on demand, pizza ordering - what more do you need :)
This project could be either. It all depends on whether the planners realize the importance of choice and competition. It makes sense for a government to build the physical data infrastructure - I'm not sure it makes sense for them to provide bandwidth over it. If the city sets up its own ISP, there will be endless political fights about what plans it offers, the tradeoffs between bandwidth, latency and cost. Instead they should allow independent competing ISP's to connect to the MAN and sell transport to consumers competitively. Then there will be a suitable offering for everyone, and no nasty lockins. Just as the government owns the roads, but most of the vehicles on the road are private/commercial.
I think that explicitly talking about telephony and video is a bad sign from a potential network provider. Just sell bandwidth; customers will figure out how to use it. By explicitly mentioning these applications, they make me wonder if they will be pushing their own hare-brained schemes. Will this be one of those "smart networks" (shudder) which have gobs of bandwidth for video (in proprietary formats) but miniscule bandwidth for TCP/IP?
Well.... Feeling lucky? The Chicago CivicNet: here
It includes the Request for Qualifications section... like connecting over 1600 offices in the metro area.
Of course, Springfield is alot smaller than Chicago, but, it is possible to provide internet access as an utility, and do it right. Just because CA utility companies have their collective heads up their asses, doesn't mean the rest of the world is like that. We trust our city government for clean safe water, which is a hell of a lot more important than checking email, give them the benefit of the doubt.
Wouldn't it be great if we gave food to hungry people?
. . . huh.
The company that purchased the physical and intellectual property of Richocet is planning to do exactly this. They want to take the network and market it to cities and offer the service in a "Utility" type solution. Sounds like a perfect fit to me.
As a former Richocet subscriber, I was very bummed when the service shut down. Nothing like getting near DSL speed access while cruising down Wilshire Blvd. on an MTA bus. It was going to be the linch pin technology of my backpack computer coming out this spring. Oh well!
Private turnpikes happen when your elected representatives fail you. Think about it. Why would you set up some private interest where they can collect money impeeding the public forever? It is always better for the public to recognize it's best interest and cooperate to bring it about. When you fail to do this, someone gets to earn a living at your expense.
Sure, private interests have a place. They can bid against each other to build it. When it's in place, they can either bid for the business or be regulated. Regulation, when it's not all fouled by an ignorant public, works for large well known and fixed indstries. There private interests can be garanteed a modest profit for their services and everyone gets their modern necessities.
We know what we want, let's try to get it. The internet is a different kind of tellecomunications that will require different regulations. There is no more need for "content" regulation than phone conversations. Private communications should be protected from interception the same way US post is. The ability to publish on it in any form must be as free as your ability to buy a Xerox machine and make a newspaper anonymously. These things, while natural extentions of our ordinary rights, have powerful enemies in government, telecomunications and publishing industries. Keep screaming your heads off.
Chcicago is beautiful.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
10 years ago, I was on like, 14.4kbps. If they installed some sort of hypothetical 14.4kbps dedicated line to everyone's home then it'd be sorely out of date by now. If they just did it within, say, a year or 2 but 10? Any reply on this would be good.
Well, well. I'd be happy with 14.4 dedicated everywhere at a nice low price, but things would be better than that. Let's say your town had put in a whole new dedicated network of phone lines and finished it last year. The wires would be there and you could run more through them and modify them as your town sees fit. It would not cost that much more to bump up to 56.6, now would it?
So what have you got instead? Because nothing was done ten years ago, you are stuck with aging phone company owned lines. You might be lucky enough to pay fifty bucks for cable TV on your puter, no servers, blocked email, barf. You might also be lucky enough to have some poor DSL company being raped by the local telco so that you can pay them fifty bucks a month for a line that's roughly twice the speed of a regualar dial up. If you are really lucky that poor dog of a company will give you a fixed IP and a TOS that's designed to keep you from obnoxing your neighbors but little else. Chaces are, the telco won't let you get that lucky.
So you see, when you sit on your ass and do nothing, people will take advantage of you.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
It's happened over and over again and people just never learn. The Paris sewer system. The London underground. The US rural electrification and interstate. Look at the costs of these huge projects. Everybody now want underground sewers, running water, public transportation, electricity, roads, phones. Each new work is a new chance to screw the public. You know, it's hard to find new houses that don't come with all of these uneeded luxuries. Dear God! When will it all end?!
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Civicnet will not be, contrary to what some commentators here have written, a city utility. The analogy that Doug Powers and other personnel have been using is that of a mall, with the city being an anchor tenant. In other words, since the success of a mall depends to some degree on the number of large square footage spaces being rented, the city with its $25M-$30M annual telecom expenses is in effect an anchor tenant renter of 'space'(reread capacity). One consortium or telecom company will be the owner of the Civicnet 'mall', and the city will just be another tenant, albeit an important tenant.
The problems here are manifold, starting with the question of whether the companies who are on the RFP(request for proposal) short list will be able to get the up front capital to build out the network. Then, with an expected time to complete of 10 years, it is questionable as to whether in the intervening time they will be able to service the debt they incur to finance the buildout and at the same time show a path to profitability.
If the issue is getting real broadband to underserved areas of Chicago, there are technologies today which can do that in less than one year, as many of the people here know.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Yet.)
;))
At least a government agency providing the service would bound by the U.S. and state Constitutions, as well as other laws limiting the power of the state.
For example, a public network probably couldn't boot you for badmouthing city officials on a web page. Most private ISPs, on the other hand, have terms in their TOS that reserves their right to cut your connection for using it to post "inappropriate content" - where "inappropriate" may be defined arbitrarily as whatever the ISP doesn't like. (I recently got Comcast@Home service, and its TOS definitely has a term like this.)
On the privacy tip, a public network would have to follow the 4th Amendment, where a private ISP need not. (of course, both would probably make you explicitly consent to arbitrary monitoring as a condition of service - this is another term every private ISP I've ever dealt with has included.)
I'm not sure how a public network would be worse than a private one. (As for Carnivore, etc. forget it - private ISPs are typically coopted voluntarily, and if they aren't, their upstream providers probably are. Besides, you don't have anything to hide, do you?
On a side note, I can't wait for the next Watergate, where the sitting party gets caught using the surveillance apparatus to spy on its real enemy - its political opponents. It's just a matter of time, IMO. But this apparatus functions just as well on private networks today as it does on the public ones.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
As I have written before here on /., we already have a MAN in Umeå, Sweden. We are currently enjoying 100 Mbps full duplex per fibre optics to our homes.
On http://www.acc.umu.se/~tfytbk/mattgrand [57.000 visitors], I describe the fibre optical network we ourselves installed in my parent's block and it is connected to the city's MAN.
The smart thing is that the hub in the entire MAN is a "DMZ" to which it is FREE to connect for anyone (you have to either provide your own router or rent a port in someone elses router).
ALL traffic within the DMZ is for FREE and the only thing that cost is capacity out to the rest of the world (since someone has to pay for the connection to the closest Internet Exchange Point).
The concept is excellent! They have upgraded the backbone in the DMZ to 10 Gbps and lots of equipment is 1 Gbps, amongst others the ISP (Bonet) that we are using. We certainly enjoy high speed, especially within our city (100.000 inhabitants), where I always get ~4000 kB/s sustained speed! (for example from my appartment, 6 km (4 miles) from my parent's house, to my server which I left back home when I moved here.)
I really think that this concept should be considered to boost the public's interest in connecting to the MAN - here in Umeå we have around 70% (!) of all households connected to this fabulous network - without doubt I live in the 'most connected' city in the world!
The fibre optics were dug during the 90s by our community owned power company, that were smart enough to put down single mode fibres when they upgraded the hot water pipelines that provides the city with heat.
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
Having lived in the chicago area my whole life I can tell you two things.
A) This will never happen because of all the political BS
B) For those of you saying Chicago already has excellent Broad Band coverage throughout the area.. your wrong and I'm talking places where it would be profitable. And Ameritech refuses to expand. So... where does that leave us..
Oh yeah those nice junky 56k ISPs. Woo hoo
I will bet that right now and forever Ameritech (a subsidiary of SBC) will do anything they can to stop this plan. In Texas when several cities including Dallas and Austin tried to build city owned MANs within their borders SBC used their wholly owned legislators to ram through a law making such networks illegal.
SBC recently hired William Daley, son and brother of Chicago mayors to "fix" SBC's problems with both the FCC and the state regulators in their Pacific Bell and Ameritech territories. Seems SBC needs to bring in some outside guns to teach them how to buy off Democrats. Being a Texas company they usually only have to buy off Republicans.
If you support the idea of publicly owned networks watch carefully for laws and amendments that will outlaw them. The SBCs of the world want to control what you can access and how you can access it. And they want to charge you at least twice for each byte you get.
Stonewolf
Or else you'se is gonna take a trunk ride to O'Hare long term parking.