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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.'"
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 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By which time, of course, the system will be hopelessly outdated, to the point where the last 40% of the people to receive it, who are not-so-coincidentally probably the ones who need it most, might as well not even have it.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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
...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...
So.. if you create your own NAN (Neighborhood Area Network), are you sticking it to the MAN?
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The Metropolitan Planning Council has information about this project from the initial RFI's.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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!
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).