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

Comments

Re:You've never heard of PGW

[Neward Rylet]

Perhaps you should mention that the mayor had has a wire tap for the past few years because he is under investigation for fraud by the FBI. There is something called pay-to-play that goes on down at city hall.

Sam Katz for Mayor!

Re:Absolutely

[symbolic]

The service will probably be contracted to a friend, it will probably suck, and there won't be much that can be done about it since the service contract will be valid for several years. As far as I'm concerned, there are very few real winners with respect to private-public partnerships- the few that get the lion's share of the money.

Something else to consider...it's damn funny to hear government entities talking about the stranglehold certain companies have (which is unfortunately true), but this same stranglehold provides the government a very convenient way to increase taxes- by conjuring up a new name for it, and calling it a "fee". I looked at my electricity bill today - it has about 7 different "fees" associated with it - one of them is 10% of the total.

I'm already wary of the monopolists. I'd be even more wary of a government-run monopoly.