Publicly Funded Broadband and 802.11

bflame writes: "The Canadian province of Alberta is building the infrastructure to provide highspeed internet service to 422 cities. The government of Alberta along with Cisco Networks, Microsoft and Axia will be installing highspeed fiber optic lines to link 422 cities. The contracts also required competition among ISPs to insure lower internet costs. Cisco provides a nice write up in IQ magazine. Globe Technologies is reporting that work has started on the Alberta Supernet. The government of Alberta has an article about the supernet along with this article." We've mentioned Alberta earlier - nice to see they're moving ahead with the project. And an anonymous reader sent in a link about the city of Tallahasee rolling out a public WLAN.

Comments

Ashland, Oregon municipal fiber network

[Voline]

Ashland, Oregon already has a publicly owned fiber-optic network through out the town.

http://www.ashlandfiber.net/

This is serving as the basis for a community wireless network. Businesses and individuals will hook 802.11b nodes up to their connections to the public broadband network and open it up to guest access by anyone within range. The goal it to get enough people involved to cover the whole town with WiFi.

http://www.ashlandunwired.com/

Technology Rolling Along?

[rand.srand()]

Not to spoil the party of those people looking for free broadband... but this strikes me as very silly for two reasons:

1) There are only 3 non-overlapping channels in 802.11b. Are all of the transmitter sites going to occupy just one of those, or will they use all of them to overlap and maximize coverage? How will this interact with private WLANs?

2) 802.11b is a stepping stone to future wireless LAN/WAN/etc technologies and a primitive one at that. Building a whole infrastructure around it is crazy. (see also: the reason North America is still on CDMA/TDMA)

I've seen a large number of projects crop up locally trying to connect all kinds of things with 802.11b... government facilities, hospitals, etc. Even my company is using it now to link our buildings. It's going to be very crowded with only 3 channels and no one to coordinate the whole mess.

Re:Getting priorities straight

[Anonymous Coward]

The public school teachers are on strike (and the government claims there isn't any more money to pay them)

The teachers are on strike because they are greedy.

For two months before the strike, all we heard about was "salaries, salaries, salaries! We want more money!".. so the government offered enough money to make them the highest paid teachers in the country, which the teachers REJECTED.

Then the day before the strike, they switch their tune to "quality of education, smaller class sizes - oh, and more money!" instead. I saw an interview with the head of the teachers union, in which he claimed they wanted better working conditions - then at the end of the interview, was asked "what would it take to prevent this strike?" and the reply was "the government could give us the 22% raise we asked for."

Smart way to take control

[bill_mcgonigle]

Interesting government tactic. Find a service out of your control that people like, then agree to provide the service to the taxpayers for 'free'. Everybody knows who's paying for the service, yet the government will still claim it's free, and thereby extend their influence and power.

What's particularly interesting is that governments typically have not taken control of means of communications where private industry has been successful. Sure, there's the Postal service, but AFAIK, that wasn't a government take over, it was a government-inspired service (at least the Pony Express part). Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here.

Governments could have provided free newspaper, telegraph, radio, telephone, and television services, but they typically haven't done this to the exclusion of private enterprise. They tend to stick to things like sewers, water, roads - things that can really only be accomplished by local governments.

This is not a good thing

[scoove]

The US had a monopoly Internet for a few years - NSFNET - which wasn't widely used by many other than academic and research folks, and really had done very poorly extending beyond subsidized locations. Yes, many of us /.ers cut our teeth there and have wonderful memories of the fun we had (at significant taxpayer expense), but we can't forget that while NSFNET advanced the protocols and connected the schools, the real revolution came when real, normal people got connected (I know, this is soooo anti-elitist!)

In 1992, I worked with a rural community of about 8,000 that wanted to launch a freenet. The local NSF regional gave us a quote of $65,000 up front plus $2,500 a month for Internet service - using a 56 Kbps leased line! (They had 35 PhDs on staff and naturally had high costs - that was their justification).

Thanks to the pioneering efforts of UUNET, CERFNET, PSI (now defunct, alas), Sprint, NEARNET/SURANET, and the folks at the Commercial Internet Exchange, the NSF monopoly (which was planned to go into a Bell-like regional with ANS and the RBOCs running the show) was broken apart. Multilateral and later, bilateral peering, became the norm. Exchange points grew (like MAE-E, MAE-W) and the commercial market blew open.

This commercialization is what also brought hundreds of millions of regular people (read "not employed by the government") onto the Internet. Not 23 years of NSFNET, but 3 years of commercial Internet.

While you'd think folks would have discovered the government model doesn't work, we still have numerous states, municipalities and even national governments trying the old way. Iowa, for instance, built a boondoggle fiber network that costs $75,000 to get a connection. Sure, you get fiber, but the Internet connectivity squeezes down to a connection no faster than an ISDN pipe at the egress to the Internet. Although the taxpayers paid for it, many of the fiber customers are leaving for - you guessed - competitive commercial service. We've got the same issues with municipalities providing broadband and having to raise electric, sewer and gas rates to cover their inefficiencies.

I really hate beating a very dead horse, but for some reason some folks like the previous poster continue to believe misnomers. The Internet isn't like a highway system and it doesn't benefit from government administration.

What it does benefit from is being offered and operated by people that focus on this and only this expertise - not people that also issue your license plates, run the welfare agencies, operate electric power, clean your sewer, etc. Being a competent ISP is not a part-time operation.

It also benefits from competition, since this is usually about the only motivator for most folks.

*scoove*

Re:Getting priorities straight

[Kwil]

For two months before the strike, all we heard about was "salaries, salaries, salaries! We want more money!".. so the government offered enough money to make them the highest paid teachers in the country, which the teachers REJECTED.

And if you dig even deeper, you find out that the reason that offer was rejected was that the money the government offered was to be pulled from funding previously earmarked for the classrooms.

Do they want more money? Damn straight. After all, the nurses got a 20-25% pay raise - conveniently just before election time, doctors got a 20-25% pay raise - conveniently just before election time, and the government even gave themselves a nice 15%-20% pay raise - conveniently just after election time. (They claim 10% but remember that MLA pay isn't taxable). The teachers see that and want some of that action. Who can really blame them? Personally, I don't think they're worth that much more either, but I can see their point.

But they don't want it at the expense of the classroom - unlike King Klein.