County-wide Wireless Broadband

An anonymous submitter sent in this story about a Maryland county providing wireless broadband to everyone, well, almost everyone, anyway. The article doesn't mention how much the service costs, and I don't see anything on the network's website either. There is a good page of information about the network, though.

Comments

Also in London, UK

[Mr Windows]

There's a pilot scheme called Consume in London. More details in the BBC article. The idea is that the network is made up of "nodes": PCs with wireless cards, and people connect to that. It's supposed to be low cost and community-based, and seems like a really nifty idea!

Looks like costs are covered by taxes

[hillct]

My reading of their website is that the costs of network operations are covered in county taxes. This is a great way to encourage those who may not have broadband access to make use of the service, since they're paying for it anyway. Granted this is the position of the technically inclined. Those less technically inclined might take umbrage at paying taxes to facilitate a service that they may not choose to use. Of course, the same argument has been made by senior citizens and those without childrand regarding town and county taxes fupporting schools, where they may not have any children in attendance, but since in that case, the arguments have been easily rebuffed, I suppose the arguments against county taxes going toward provision of network access, could be just as easily if not more easily rebuffed.

--CTH

Re:Looks like costs are covered by taxes

[gmhowell]

I can understand the argument. But in this case, it might encourage people to move into the area. And that is badly needed. Allegheny Co. is largely interchangeable with any of hundreds of areas from Pittsburgh, through West Va. down to the Gulf. They all have their problems. The problem in All. Co. is that the mines are spent. There's no work. If this gets some tech types to move in, that's a good thing. And I'm glad that the citizens who approved this understand that.

Rural Broadband == Government?

[bill_mcgonigle]

This looks like a fabulous technical setup, and I must admit I'm a bit envious. Up here in rural New Hampshire, I can't get broadband either (besides high-latency satellites) and wireless looks like the best solution.

There doesn't appear to be any commercial interest in doing so, despite sputterings from several companies. I'm assuming this is what happened in Allegany County also, then someone at the government took the bull by then horns.

When the government decided everyone should have electricity, a different situation emerged - they incentivized private industry to get it done, through tax incentives. However, when the government decided everyone should have books, they opened libraries. When they thought everyone should have better TV they granted short-term monopolies. When they thought everyone should have telephones, they granted long-term monopolies.

This project has many qualities of the above examples, and I'm not sure it's going the right way. Electrical transmission systems and libraries can afford to evolve as quickly as most government buracracies move, and that's not a problem. With the Internet, it might be a problem down the road. For a historical example, in some locales, governments did grand those long-term telephone monopolies to small companies, effectively paragovernments, and many people in those small towns are just now getting service reasonable enough to use with a modem. Will a government-run agency be able ot adapt fast enough when they next big thing comes along?

Re:Public Utility

[laserjet]

I can't speak for the person you replied to, but if you asked me the same question, I would reply:

Because I would not like to see the government get involved.

My philosophy is for minimal government, and that government should only exist where it would not be possible to do something otherwise. Here is a few examples:

The United States Postal Service: There was a definate need here to send packages back and forth across the nation, and the governement was definately right for stepping in and fulfilling the need of our young nation. However, now we still have the USPS and the need is not there. There are other couriers who would be able to deliver your packages more quickly and cheaper than the government. Many people do not see this point, because they are subsidizing the post office, and it "seems" like it is often cheaper. In reality, your tax dollars pay for the "cheaper" price. If non governement couriers (i.e. Fedex, UPS, etc) were to get the big chunk of business that the governement currently has, we would see cheaper rates, better service, and we would have a choice. There was initially a need for the governement to have a postal service, now there is not.

Another example is the recent switch of airport security personnel to be government employees. Does anyone feel safer just because the government is doing the security now? I sure don't. In many cases, it is the exact same people doing the job. The governement did this for one reason: control. Having more control over the security workers is a good thing, but at what cost? The price we pay for the government to control things is a slow-moving, slow-correcting animal.

Now, sure I would love to have high-speed wireless access in my community, it would be awesome. but it would do two things:

1) It would not allow for any competitors to come in and start their own service. Competition is good. Ultimately the consumer would get better service at a cheaper price.

2) Service would most likely lack. In this, I mean new areas would be slow to be covered with wireless access because of all the red tape needed to secure additional governement funding as projects grow. Customer service would likely become lackluster as there is no need to provide a high level of service if you are the only game in town.


So, I would rather see corporations move in and let capitalism and all it's effects (good and bad) rule over what kind of service we get. It may not always work, but in my opinoing, if the government does not HAVE to provide a service, they should let competitors provide it.

Coolest Application (imho)

[mdecerbo]

To me, the use of Allconet that's just about as cool (well, okay, almost as cool) as wireless broadband to the home is that they've gotten the local animal shelter on line. (The Cumberland Times-News had an article on this, mirrored here.

What that's meant is that, since people can easily see what animals are up for adoption without having to schlep down to the pound, the Allegheny County animal shelter had 60% of its stray animals adopted last year.

That's two or three times the 20%-30% national average, which means a lot more happy kids, and a lot fewer wasted lives of animals.
And it's a pretty low-tech process, once you've got a Web connection: a volunteer takes digital pictures every morning and puts them on a Web page.

I'm a geek and I'm usually more wrapped up in orphaned hardware than orphaned animals, but this made me kinda happy.
Are other animal shelters doing this?