San Fran Mayor Declares Wireless for All

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."

Comments

Spare me all the evil socialism rants...

[rory77]

(This post is very rambly and starts off subject, but does get back to SF wireless eventually :) )

For everyone that wanks off over the greatness of competition and the private sector, think about how worthless America's cellular phone infrastructure is. I lived in China back in 2000 and they already had much better service, coverage, and prices in a crappy 3rd world country than we have NOW. The reason was because they didn't let a bunch of corporate asses each roll out redundant but incompatible network infrastructure while rewarding execs with massive paychecks and handouts. (those good old private sector telecoms fought for 5 years to keep cellphone users from having number portability and various other consumer rights)

A similar private sector redundant waste exists in our healthcare system where the number of parasites (aka insurance people, administrators and paperwork handlers) increased by about 2,500% in 30 years while the number of VALUABLE WORKERS (docs and nurses) didn't even double. That massive waste and inefficiency would be eliminated with a single payer health insurance system which means the government is the ONLY HEALTH INSURER and EVERYONE BUYS(if able) AND HAS INSURANCE (it doesn't mean the government has any control over doctors or hospitals, only with paying the bills). Here are some benefits of single payer (eliminating for-profit health insurance):

• no more problem with rising number of uninsured patient emergencies bankrupting trauma centers
• no more problems with employers cutting insurance benefits as EVERYONE has them regardless of job (for a cheaper price too)
• no more problems with massive health INEQUALITY (short life expectancy, bad infant mortality, poor treatment) for the poor
• no more problems of Uncle Sam footing the bill for the sick & old & poor while private insurers GET RICH INSURING THE HEALTHY & WEALTHY.
• no more cruelty of people being denied insurance for "pre-existing conditions" which is a term that ONLY EXISTS IN AMERICA ! (since in other nations insurance is universal)

(i consider it an evil when massive profit is made by insurance executives and shareholders while 45 million Americans lack insurance)

It's all about a SHARED RISK POOL.

Now, LET'S GET ON WITH THE WIRELESS. First of all, wireless is powerful because of its 2 or 3 dimensional nature. A single access point doesn't just serve one room or outlet but instead blankets a large area. SF is a TINY CITY of only 49 square miles (SF is squished on a peninsula). So relatively few access points are needed to cover the entire city with decent bandwidth.

NOW, SOMETHING YOU PROBABLY DON'T KNOW is that SF will be excavating and replacing its ancient sewer system over the next five years. It will be easy for the city to lay fiber optic cable trunks simultaneously and get THE CITY ITSELF into the ISP business, bypassing the current cable & phone utilities. For most of the 750,000 San Francisco citizens some sort of "free" (small taxation) wireless access would be perfectly adequate since they just check email or browse internet. For the bandwidth hogging downloaders and low-latency craving gamers, they could pay a nominal fee for a wired city ISP (it's predicted the city could offer city broadband for only $5 / month). This undercuts the $40-$50 charged by the cable and DSL thieves.

SO WHY IS IT PROBABLY VALUABLE FOR SAN FRANCISCO TO PROVIDE WIRELESS TO THE CITY? Societies build value by building infrastructure. For 95% of San Francisco citizens the ISP is a total parasite that rips them off for way more $$$ than they really use on the network. How else do crapheads like Comcast have enough SPARE $$$ to nearly purchase Disney (though Eisner fought them off i think) ?? It's simple. Our municipalities sell off the rights to monopolize and then these private utilities in turn rip off consumers and dole out dividends, options, and huge pay to their own