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San Fran Mayor Declares Wireless for All

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the throwing-down-the-gauntlet dept.

arvind s. grover writes "San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom stated yesterday in his state of the city address that every San Francisco resident will have free wireless internet access. They don't seem to have much set up yet, and no proposal was laid out for the installation of access points in every nook and cranny of the city. I wonder what vendor is going to get that contract...You might be better off finding a wireless node using NodeDB or this oddly-titled site: cheesebikini."

8 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good idea...but... by seudafed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My girlfriend is interning at Berkeley Mental Health. You'd be suprised how many homeless people have web pages or at least email addresses.

    sky

  2. Re:Is this necessarily a good thing? by Rayonic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > I mean, the wireless isn't "free", taxdollars are paying for it.

    Indeed -- and what if I don't like the wireless service the city provides (the service is slow, etc.) I could get cable or DSL internet access, but then I'd essentially be paying for two internet connections.

    Then there's the issue of rules. What kind of access restrictions will a city put up? Could you, in this instance, host a web site that gay people find insulting? I've never been banned from a service that I still had to pay for afterwards...

    --
    [PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
  3. Anti-competitive? by Spykk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder what the local ISPs think about this. If it's wrong for microsoft to include a free web browser, is it wrong for the government to provide free internet access?

  4. Wireless in SanFran?? by jmcmunn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have never been to San Fran myself, but my dad has on numerous occasions. And from his stories, the terrain in SF is "pretty hilly" to say the least. I have had problems at home with my wireless sometimes reaching from one floor to another without messing around with the antenae all the time. It seems like they're going to need a heck of a lot of repeaters/ap's for this to work out at all in that terrain.

    Wouldn't it be cheaper just to run hard-wired fiber into every building, and drop off a linksys wireless router to everyone? Probably not really, but it sure seems like it is going to be very difficult to get a good wireless network in that terrain.

    is there an election coming up in SF that this guy is trying to get votes for?

  5. Re:Is this necessarily a good thing? by AndroidCat · · Score: 5, Interesting
    What kind of access controls will there be? Can any kind of abuser (spam, DDoS, port-scan, trojaned zombie, etc) keep connecting if (ever) disconnected? Will they block some ports like 25? What if someone sucks down most of the bandwidth in the neighbourhood? Can I run servers with dynamic DNS? Who do I report a DDoS from SF space to?

    If they don't manage it, the rest of the Internet might just throw the San Francisco wireless IP range into a "blackhole at the firewall" list in self-defence. And if SF taxpayers can't connect to anyone, who do they call at "SanFran Tech Support" to complain?

    --
    One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
  6. Re:Is this necessarily a good thing? by autarkeia · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The mayor is *not* trying to get re-elected. The mayor, in fact, is only in the first year of his 4-year term, and by just about any San Franciscan's account he has done nothing but kicked ass and mopped up the streets afterwards. He has completely revamped the budget, took a voluntary pay cut, reorganized the police and fire departments, cracked down on unsolved murders and crime, led the nation on human rights and gay marriage issues, and tackled San Francisco's biggest issue-- homelessness-- with a multidisciplinary team that seems to actually be working.

    Say whatever you want to about Gavin Newsom, but he has been a major boon to San Francisco at a time when it's down. The WiFi thing of course could cost a lot of money, but imagine the potential benefits of pervasive, citywide, free access.

  7. What's up with all the broken Coral cache links? by douglips · · Score: 4, Interesting

    All the links in the story end in ".nyud.net:8090", in an attempt to use Coral. The problem is, that is appended after everything else, which makes it irrelevant.

    Remember, its:
    http://hostname.com.nyud.net:8090/rest/of/ur i?what ever
    not
    http://hostname.com/rest/of/uri?whateve r.nyud.net: 8090

    Strangely enough, in this case all the links seem to work faster than their coral counterparts.

    Fixed coral links:
    Reuters story
    NodeDB
    cheesebikini

    --
    My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
  8. Re:Good idea...but... by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This is a college town phenomenon. I live in Cambridge, MA and we have tons of 15-25 year old semi-homeless kids. Sure, there are the 50 year old, Vietnam vet, burned out folks (many with serious mental health issues), and the older guys who are career panhandler Spare Change selling types - these are usually the loudest, slickest panhandlers, but they are numerically fairly small, whereas you see tons of the panhandling kids.


    Most of them seem to be disaffected teenagers who have temporarily run away from home or something along those lines. And sometimes they aren't actually homeless at all, they just panhandle because they think it's cool (no, I'm not kidding).


    Ah well, the nice things about Cambridge more than make up for some of its eccentricities. College towns with rampant communist subcultures are magnets for this sort of thing (makes you realize what would happen if an entire society decided to depend on other peoples handouts and decided to stop doing productive work).