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Philadelphia Considering Municipal Wi-Fi

Posted by Zonk on from the surfing-the-aether dept.

sebFlyte writes "The row over Muni Wi-Fi continues as cities and other municipal authorities consider building massive Wi-Fi networks to give lots of people low-cost wireless net access. CNET is running an article written by the CIO for the city of Philadelphia, explaining why she thinks it's time to break the telcos de-facto monopoly and for public agencies to start offering public services." We have previous covered Taipei's efforts along these lines to create a for-pay service

3 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Duplicate by Xylaan · · Score: 5, Informative

    The concept is duplicate, but at the CIO letter was written yesterday, I believe this is more of an update to an ongoing story.

    Slashdot has enough actual dupes that we don't need any false positives :)

  2. very hard to do... by Menotti+M · · Score: 5, Informative
    Muni-WiFi cannot work if they stick to current 802.11 technologies. WiFi was built for very small LAN deployments. As there are only 11 channels for 802.11, interference is going to pose a big problem with home users' own WiFi networks, as well as technologies that run in the 2.4 GHz band of the spectrum.

    If they choose to use a technology more suited for a WAN deployment, like the unproven WiMax, this is more of a political move than anything else. The government is trying to look like it is hip with technology and attract the tech-savvy crowd. However, such a deployment is not good for competition, as governments receive special tax-exempt status and would either take many companies out of the market completely, or lend a huge advantage who whomever the government contracts. And what happens when the technology / project goes belly up? In the normal market, companies go bankrupt. The government, however, will just throw (and waste) more money at it.

  3. For something that cannot work... by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Informative

    ..an awful lot of cities have already been doing it for a long time.

    Including my town, which has had free WiFi covering a large portion of the city for over a year. I and I know for a fact that we aren't the only city doing this, plenty of others in the US already have simmilar setups.

    If your home WAP had been using the same channel as the city, tough cookes. Change your channel. Is it really that freaking difficult? Took me less than 30 seconds on my linksys.