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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

5 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. What To Look Forward To? by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If Philadelphia suceeds you can count on the following:

    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?

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  2. 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 :)

  3. Potholes by bsd4me · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would prefer them to fix all of the potholes first...

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  4. 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.

  5. Ramifications by popo · · Score: 5, Insightful


    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.

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