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Philadelphia Considering Municipal Wi-Fi
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
People winging about how poor the service is.
Talkshow hosts berating the government for more give-aways of taxpayer dollars (sponsored by some telco)
Saturation and further complaints (my taxdollars pay for, won't stand for it, etc)
Ultimately it'll actually be pretty good service.
Why is this a good idea anyway? Look at the stranglehold Cable TV has on communities. (oh, sure you can go satellite, but it's still not price competitive because they're pricing to compete with near monopolies) If municipalities insisted cable could be laid under the condition a cable company will sell, at a reasonable price, bandwidth on their cable to competitors, would we be paying such huge prices?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I would prefer them to fix all of the potholes first...
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
I am OK with municipal utilities, I think it is inappropriate to make it free. If there is a need among the low-income, offer discounts or make it free for them on a need basis. Having your users pay by default would more likely pay for the setup.
I am no fan of the DSL / cable duopoly, but not giving them or other commercial interests a chance would be a disservice to tax payers due to the potential for waste and stifles competition from viable alternatives.
The ramifications of free wi-fi are greater than just web access... The upshot is of course, free telephone service as well.
This IMHO is where the real problems are going to begin. The telco's aren't just going to lose their internet business over this, they'd lose their businesses.
Not that we'd be sorry to see them go, but it should be acknowleged that we're talking about more than web browsing here.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The city itself shouldn't be talking about forming a monopoly, supporting a monopoly or operating a utility. Instead the city should be doing what it needs to do to facilitate the creation of city-wide mesh networks by private providers.
There are several impediments to the creation of city-wide wireless mesh networks. The first, and perhaps most important, is right of way. The second is cost.
A good model would include the city throwing out an RFP asking for proposals to create a city-wide mesh network that accomplishes the following:
- Covers at least X% of the city, where X is a large enough percentage to ensure that poor areas of the city are at least partially covered in mesh.
- Provides at least X mbps throughput to all users
- Allows independent providers to use the network to provide their own brand of wireless mesh services, for appropriate fees
In exchange, providers get:- The right to borrow money at favorable rates through the use of the city's credit. The city floats bonds, and then loans the money to the chosen provider(s) at the same interest rate as the bonds themselves
- Streamlined approval of right of way throughout the city, probably using the city's lamposts
- A temporary monopoly on some types of premium services on the network (i.e. the provider is forced to allow the rebranding of the regular tier of service, but a higher tier of service [twice as fast?] is the sole province of the provider for X years).
New York City has an interesting plan out there for better cell phone coverage under a similar model: offering right of way on the city's lamposts in exchange for certain guarantees. See New York Times coverage on the subject.Aside from the philosophical discussion on whether this SHOULD be done, I see two implimentation problems:
1) This is going to cause major interference with pre-existing wi-fi networks. I don't use of want my private network degraded by the ever-present WIFI service set up with repeaters throughout the city.
2) It's going to be VERY difficult to get people to be smart about use, and avoid giving out key personal information over the airwaves. Identity theieves already collects lots of information in Starbucks and ball fields. Can you imagine how bad the problem would be with access city-wide?
The TVA provided "low cost" electricity in that it didn't charge much per kilowatt-hour. Of course if you include the massive tax funded expenses to build the whole thing, it actually was quite expensive, which is why no private company wanted to touch it.