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.'"

Comments

One step closer...

[The Great Wakka]

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!

Re:One step closer...

[elizard2k]

umm infinite bandwidth????
uhh no ..
also you probably are assuming that coroporation can support EVERYONE doing about 50mbps traffic at peak times .. everyone in you'r neighborhood, or city, or however it would be divided up

MAN?

[Dirtside]

*looks at story*

*looks at Beowulf joke*

Forget it.

I hope this doesn't end up like Boston...

[Ieshan]

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.

I knew this would happen sooner or later...

[Uttles]

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.

Timeline?

[TheGreenLantern]

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.

Re:Timeline?

[Doomdark]

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.

Still... It has taken 20 years for telephone 'companies' (monopolies) to get from slow modems to slow ISDN-lines; for selected few even DSL is available. And this despite the fact that technology hasn't been the major problem for years now. They have succesfully been dragging their proverbial feet, while leeching out nice bounties.

So, I don't really know; non-competitive monopolies / cartels have already shown the worst case scenario, perhaps this might be the time to try out the alternatives, including society funded infrastructure projects?

Like I have said before, physical infrastructure might as well be built and maintained (mostly) by society (a la roads), but the layers above (from ISPs to content production) can and should be mostly left to companies. And of course, if private enterprises can actually produce better (less expensive, higher capacity with same price etc) physical infrastructure than towns and counties (while still making profit), they would be free to do so.

Re:Timeline?

[Detritus]

The telephone isn't a necessity of life either, but society has become dependent on it.

When I was a kid, you could see fire alarm boxes at regular intervals on every street. If there was a fire, you pulled the lever on the box and a clockwork mechanism inside the box sent a message to the fire department. It has been years since I've seen one of those boxes. The were made obsolete by the wide availability of telephones.

On a recent trip to a local grocery store, the store manager announced that they were having problems with their registers and that they would only be accepting cash until the problem was resolved. The problem was an outage with their Verizon high-speed data line. This had a noticable effect on the volume of business in the store. Their customers had become accustomed to using ATM and credit cards to make their purchases. Even the state issues welfare recipients something that works like an ATM card for food purchases.

Already Outdated

[fobbman]

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.

Re:Already Outdated

[11thangel]

This doesn't just outdate M.A.N., but it at the same time implements new protocols which it is fully aware M.A.N. is incapable of understanding. M.A.N. has tried to overcome this and merge networks with W.O.M.A.N., but has failed miserably due to communications errors.

Re:Already Outdated

[zmooc]

Well...it's said that this performance-bug doesn't occure until the device is a few years old. Just get a new one every few years and you should be fine:) There are also rumours that the problems suddenly disappear when the device gets really old, but I haven't been able to confirm this. I've also heard rumours that the performance problems are accompanied by `some other kind of trouble' somewhere around the Communication Unit for Network Troubleshooting. I'm about to investigate this Unit now so I will let you know when I know more about the nature of these problems.

Support open standards...

[Rude Turnip]

If M$ had their way, they'd branch off a rib of this new network and create a Windows-only MAN, or WoMAN.

Public Ownership of the Infrastructure...

[Bonker]

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.

Re:Public Ownership of the Infrastructure...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I've been known to brag to out-of-towners about Denver's light rail system (which is excellent -- the only problem with it is that it's not big or interconnected enough yet.) If done right, a municipal network could be a wonderful thing, fully as much of an asset to the community as a good transit system -- and the much-maligned El train is actually a pretty good way to get around Chicago, IIRC from the limited amount of time I've spent there.

OTOH, since the article says they're planning to have private contractors handle most of it ... eh. To me that implies massive cost overruns and lots of taxpayer money disappearing into executives' pockets. Public is good, private is good, the combination of the two is usually a two-headed monster that makes a few people very rich and does no one else any good at all (e.g., Denver's experiments with privatizing chunks of our bus system.) If they want a public network, that's what they should build.

Re:Public Ownership of the Infrastructure...

[crucini]

Coming from New York, where the highways are perpetually "under construction", far too narrow for the traffic and in horrible condition, I was amazed by the New Jersey Turnpike. A broad, smooth, well-maintained highway with tollbooths.

Of course New York's subway system is definitely something to brag about. Convenient, fast, ubiquitous 24-hour public transit.

So the answer is yes, transit systems are well worth bragging about and are a major element in deciding where to live.

Re:Public Ownership of the Infrastructure...

[dillon_rinker]

While it is an infrastructure, it is not a "vital" infrastructure

There is no "vital" infrastructure.

Water? Ancient cities had no water distribution system. The Roman aqueduct systems brought water to cities but did not distribute it widely - mainly to public baths and rich peoples' homes.

Gas? Gas hasn't been available for most of human history. It is quite dangerous. No house ever exploded from a candle or firewood leak.

Electricity? Why would you need electricity? For lights? What do you think the gaslights are for?

Telephones? What do you need a telephone in your home for? If you were a business, perhaps it would be useful, but no one needs it in their home.

Broadband internet? That didn't even exist ten years ago. What makes you think it's vital?

Point being, of course, that in a modern, forward-looking society, ALL of these are VITAL infrastructure; all of these should be distributed to every home. Unless you've got one of those weird all-electrical homes that doesn't need gas. Or one of those natural-gas fuel cells so you don't need any electricity. But I digress...

alameda

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Privacy Concerns

[SocialWorm]

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.

Re:Privacy Concerns

[infernalC]

This could be good or bad:

• 
  This sort of public network will help create an awareness among users about their own privacy and will encourage users to educate themselves about good computing practices, including using encrypted protocols for everything. The cryptosystems available for free to the public today (like RSA) are excellent, and people will learn to use them once they get burned. It will help to improve the security of network implementations on consumer operating systems and spurr competition among software companies; commercial network software will no longer be acceptable to the consumer if it does not exhibit the security excellence that open source network software does.
• This being a government-owned network, however, could lead to antiprivacy regulation. The city or another government entity could set policies prohibiting encryption, much like the FCC prohibits encryption over certain radio bands. The proponents of such regulations will certainly point to terrorism as a factor mitigating this evil.

This will undoubtedly lead to the end of a way of thinking: that physical barriers are not adequate to ensure network privacy. Moreover, I think you will se companies and individuals use VPNs to replace the separation they once had with the outside world.

Thanks for reading.

10 years?

[koreth]

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.

Re:10 years?

[Ieshan]

That's assuming that the net will become nearly 10 times as fast and be available to consumers that way in 10 years.

I don't really foresee this happening, do you? We've been more closely focusing, now, on making better ways of of delivering information - such as airport or wireless networking - than we have on improving its speeds drastically. In networking, that is.

Re:10 years?

[Restil]

That all depends on what type of networking they're rolling out. There is a big difference between the top of the line in networking architecture and what the average joe consumer uses. If they run a fibre drop to each home, then the capacity for upgrading will be in place for years to come. The only physical upgrades will need to take place at the central offices and routers and not individual runs to each home.

At least, I HOPE that's what they do. Installing connections that are only capable of 1.54mbps might suffice for a few years, but consumers will probably outgrow that in a short period of time. However, there is nothing stopping a company from planning far enough in the future to make it last for a while.

And then there are companies such as netpliance who thought that the average consumer still used only dialup and planned to continue that trend for the next 5+ years. And they're gone.

-Restil

Re:10 years?

[Sloppy]

In 1986 I was installing 10 Mbps ethernets. It wasn't considered super-fast or anything; it was just what everybody did.

If I had a 10 Mbps connection between my home and the Internet today in 2002, I would be a happy camper (except for the BNC headaches ;-).

Last mile is always way slower than LANs. If you use modern LAN stuff to lay out somebody's last mile today, it'll still be tolerable in 2012. And, as other have mentioned, if you use the right medium (fiber), you can run faster speeds later.

A wonderful idea...

[Memophage]

...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...

Re:A wonderful idea...

[damiam]

Unless the city, whose lawyers are probably not complete idiots, puts something in the terms of service to the effect of "I hereby recognize that the city of Chicago is not in any way responsible or liable for the content of the network and I agree not to try to sue the shit out of them if I catch my kid looking at porn."

Re:A wonderful idea...

[Jeffrey Baker]

This isn't how a MAN works. In a MAN, the city operates the physical infrastructure but the networking is up to the customers entirely. It really is comparable to a road. The public pays for the road but they don't control where or when you travel.

Re:A wonderful idea...

[Jeffrey Baker]

No of course not. The city runs a wire from A to B. Customer at A gets to buy service from B who puts equipment in the central office to do X. Doesn't matter who B is or what X is. All the city has to do is lay the cable and auction the space in the CO.

NAN - Neighborhood Area Network

[abischof]

So.. if you create your own NAN (Neighborhood Area Network), are you sticking it to the MAN?

More information about the project

[regen]

The Metropolitan Planning Council has information about this project from the initial RFI's.

Good options now, but could be better

[joshv]

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

Re:Good options now, but could be better

[cancrman]

This is coming a bit late in the convo but....

I highly doubt that Yupps are going to move down to 51st and Cermak just so they can save $30 a month on their DSL bill. I know I wouldn't. My personal saftey is worth much, much more than that. Gentrification is happening, it's just happening slowly. The south loop is just being developed. Cabrini Green is slowly being torn down (Now that is PRIME real estate). Living west of Western avenue can still be sort of sketchy. Don't even talk about Uptown. You couldn't pay me to live there.

I'm quite happy paying my $50/month for Earthlink and living in my nice Wicker Park condo thank you very much.

Pete

Well, it may work, it may not...

[irregular_hero]

A lot of cities have tried to do this, most of them by setting up interconnections in the local Metro area. For example, in Nashville, Tennessee, the city government actually funded an initiative to interconnect all businesses in the city at a site they co-owned with BellSouth. The goal was to centralize and provide a faster "lane" of access to local citizenry for area businesses.

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.

The whole city? Unlikely

[YouAreFatMan]

Chicago is a big place. There are large areas of the city full of projects and poverty. The people in these areas don't have bank accounts, computers, or DVD players. According to the article, the city is looking for private corporations to build this network. It's unlikely that anyone putting broadband in would bother with areas that wouldn't be profitable.

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.

Re:The whole city? Unlikely

[Deadplant]

Here in Ottawa the need to provide affordable service to poor and rural areas is very much taken into consideration. Just like when Bell Canada deployed the national phone system; whoever gets contracted to build our fiber lines will be required to build-out to Everyone, not just the profitable areas.

Finally, we get it

[SirSlud]

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.

Re:Finally, we get it

[alen]

As soon as government starts paying out real market competative salaries they will hire decent people. And when they will be able to fire the scrubs. Currently it takes an act of God to fire a government employee. One has to steal or kill someone to get fired from the government. And so you have a lot of dead wood around.

Re:Finally, we get it

[SirSlud]

I agree, but dont put the cart before the horse. I'm not entirely sure it's like that because 'its the government', or because we're still not done buying more and more into this opinion, and thus more and more of the dead wood is left while those with higher levels of aptitude continue to equate salary with happiness (a value system that tends to eventually reach an apex in most cultures and societies).

But obviously, point taken. Just keep the pendulum of public opinion and value systems in mind, and dont judge against values you perceive to be 'absolute'.

out of date?

[smallblackdog]

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.

Re:out of date?

[Deadplant]

That's why we they should be using fiber. Fiber is very nicely scaleable, start with 10mbit because it's cheap then you can scale to 10gigabit by just changing the routers on either end of you cables. (and of course 10gigabit/s isn't the ultimate maximum, Nortel/JDS Uniphase and all those guys are upping the max all the time.)

Wireless?

[syrupMatt]

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.

Re:Wireless?

[mr_burns]

it might be as easy as inking a deal with broadband provider to give reduced rates to those that use routers (airport, linksys) with 802.11 built in, with the city making up the difference and mail in rebates for those routers.

The deal also enhances the name ID and rollout for that provider.

MAN is a great idea

[Deadplant]

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.

Re:MAN is a great idea

[Bonker]

The thing is that this will happen in only 1 or 2 cities before these 'dark fiber' networks will 'become' the internet by default.

Let's put it this way. Let's say your business lives in a large city that has a ubiquitous network like this. All your customers have cheap routers, and most of them are in the city. Will you pay an ISP for connectivity to these customers if you didn't need any more?

If you're an network or communications intensive business such, where are you going to movie your business after hearing about this?

If City 'A' is doing it, and getting business, how long will it be before City 'B' picks up the slack to try to keep businesses from leaving?

It's a bit of a watershed, like electrical wiring and phone wiring was in the early part of the 20th century. It's not going to happen overnight, but once it does, you can bet that it will become a civics project in *every* city in just a few years, and will start interconnecting.

(OT): You know you've been web stuff too long when

[Pfhreakaz0id]

... my first thought was "Geez, I wonder what Javascript function is throwing back the old NaN (Not a Number)... musta forgot a '+' operator..."

Tacoma did this a while back...

[cowboy junkie]

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.

..and the WOlrd Metro Area Network is called?

[syncronis]

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

In other news

[selectspec]

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.

Not First or Best.

[Martin S.]

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/newsid _9 60000/960909.stm

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 ?

My proposal

[trenton]

This one comes in under the 10 year timeline and you can start today. The City should secure massive volume discounts for 802.11b hardware, both APs and NICs. The City then hands out the APs for free and offers the NICs at market rate. It helps pay for the subsidizes on the APs with the profit it makes on the NICs.

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

Wireless is not the future.

[Nonesuch]

Wireless (Meaning Microwave or other RF) is the wrong direction to go for any critical system. By using 19th century technology (tuned spark gap transmitter) it is trivial to jam all RF communications in a particular frequency range. Area of coverage is limited only by the amount of power available to (and usable by) the transmitter.

Liquid(TJ) writes:

Beat me to it. I kind of doubt that ten years from now we'll be using wired connectivity at all, at least as far as the end-user is concerned.

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.

Slippery slope

[Gothmolly]

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" ?

Re:Slippery slope

[BinxBolling]

Where in the Constitution does it say that cities shall not be in the communications business? This is not much different in spirit than running a postal service (which is specifically permitted to Congress in Article I, Section 8).

NOOO, please dont make it another public utility

[argoff]

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!

Re:So, the gov't wants a MAN...

[BinxBolling]

NO tellecommuting!

I doubt they'd put this restriction on it. If Chicago is like many cities, the opportunity to reduce traffic by encouraging people to telecommute would be a big selling point for this scheme.

Wonderful or Terrible?

[crucini]

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?

Re:Hey!

[Grahf]

Wouldn't it be great if we gave food to hungry people?

. . . huh.

How it is supposed to be

[Erris]

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.

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.

OK, I'll bite

[Erris]

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.

an' that's just what I told them.

[Erris]

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.

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?!

What Civicnet really is.

[emes]

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.

public network = bound by Constitution(s)

[isaac]

(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

Beware of SBC...

[stonewolf]

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