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Free Wi-Fi Threatened?
jasonmicron writes "The Houston Chronicle is reporting that if certain state officials have their way, cities in the state of Texas will no longer be able to offer free WiFi to their citizens. This could set a dangerous precedent if passed, as broadband providers could start lobbying officials in the other 49 states to ban free WiFi as well. According to the article, Pennsylvania has already fallen victim to such a law but it excluded Philedelphia due to the city's 'existing efforts.'"
I think we should be asking ourselves whether public wifi is a good idea, if competition is available (not always the case, but is true in big cities like Philadelphia). I mean, how reliable would such a service be? How fast? Secure? And the funding has to come from somewhere....
Note how many of the first comments in this thread are all Anonymous Cowards and are all anti-municipal WIFI. The Telcos have millions to spend on PR to kill muni wifi. Looks like some of those millions is going to the Internet.
Muni WiFi ALL THE WAY!!
As soon as my metro area goes muni wifi, I am gonna cut off my DSL AND my landline. Buh-Bye Big Telco....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Good question! On that note, why do we have well-maintained roads and highways, and streetlamps, and hospitals, and schools, and firemen and policemen? Why don't we just privatize EVERYTHING, dammit!!
How about free services offered by free citizens at their own expense?
It's not. But if the residents of a city want to share the cost of wireless internet access, why should state legislatures and the telecom industry be allowed to stop them? But even if the law gets passed, there's nothing to stop people from creating non-profit organizations to do the same thing. It would just be a bit more work to get the required funding.
what benefits exist if the government provides wifi networks instead of corporations?
Probably lower costs for the consumers. But, that's only if it stays at the city level. My gut feeling is that doing something like that at the state or federal level would only waste lots of time and money.
who is going to pay for this?
The tax payers, obviously. Or, in the case of a non-profit organization, anyone who wants to help cover the costs. Keep in mind that if money was short, a non-profit org might have to limit access to contributors only, or cap bandwidth for non-contributors.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
It seems that there are three obvious sides here-
1) WiFi/Net access is a luxury. It is not a basic utility and should not be considered one. The availability of massive quantities of information to the public might be in the general interest, but they can go to a library.
2) Net access is becoming a utility. It is as necessary to the everyday life of the average american as running water and electricity. Remember, we started out without them. At what point does Net Access work that way? We're not quite at that debate yet. We probably won't be there for a while, although maybe it'll be considered if and when somebody establishes a monopoly.
3) Incentive. Are communities providing free wifi to encourage businesses to move in/stay local? This seems the best reason to do it. Although it might be better addressed by providing a tax incentive to businesses to provide indoor coverage than by a government-controlled system that's going to be inefficiently managed. [As a side-note, are these systems going to remain as open as they are after the first few major hacks from such points? What about liability for the Wireless Access provider? Does he have any responsibility to be sure his hardware isn't being used for malicious purposes, or is it like a payphone in the back of your business?]
Mmmm... just a few uninformed thoughts.
The real answer is that there are solid reasons that exist for municipal wifi. Say you have a city like Philadelphia blanketed with wifi, or wimax, or whatever they decide to use (wifi for now). Cops are always online, ambulances are able to be online while traveling, trucking and delivery are better able to work with real-time inventory.
Then there's the issue of the digital divide. Forget the individuals, let's talk about the communities that aren't cost-effective for the ISPs to run broadband into. If the government doesn't get involved, what are they going to do?
I live in Long Beach, CA. The downtown is covered with free wifi. It's great, but most certainly hurts the cable and telephone companies. Everyone I know who lives around there picks up the wireless from downtown at home. Don't think that these anti-municipal wifi bills weren't preceded by heavy lobbying from Verizon (in Texas) and the cable companies.
There are places in the US where broadband is not available. *A collective gasp sucks the air out of the room* That's right, those places exist. For example, I live in the big empty spot in Virginia west of Richmond, east of Lynchburg, and Northwest of South Hill. There's no service here. The only hope of service is if the local public school system can get permission to put up a wireless network. (Which they're trying to do) The big corporations do not think it's profitable to wire the area, which is probably true. Heck, there's STILL no cable here; if you want TV, enjoy satellite or an antenna. It's so bad, Verizon won't even update the phone lines enough for me to dial in to any service provider at a speed higher than 26.4k. You read that right. And that, my friends, is why government should be allowed to provide internet. - Trip
1/ Quality of service. Government involvement doesn't stamp out competition. It could spur private enterprises to provide better, faster, stabler, less conjested service. It could potentially mean *more* competition.
2/ This is a public good. Many hard-core libertarians would disagree with money spent on public goods, and that's really just a matter of philosophy. But given the precedents of public parks (why build public parks when you could have Green Grass Enterprises provide parks and charge the little kids money each time they want to go down a slide?), public libraries (why have libraries when you can be overcharged by Borders?), a military (why have government build and own the nukes that protected us from the USSR and not NukeUSA Inc.?), etc., what is wrong with public Internet? Oh, right, Internet is more lucrative than the park business. Anyway, enough sarcasm. The point is, the precedent is set. Sometimes the line between special interests and genuine public goods can be blurry, but in this case, I'd definitely call it a public good, and by precedent, it should be fine!
3/ A rising tide raises all ships. Sometimes, social engineering is a good thing. Seeing as how much a paradigm the Internet is, getting people access to it can help change the nature of society. By the way, most economists (even conservative ones) consider education and information to be public goods.
And /. has already gone down that long road arguing the pros/cons of sharing bandwidth with your neighbors, I know all the arguments, I've done all the precautions, we're not going there for this discussion.
"Why aren't the ISPs offering wireless access?" Something's terribly wrong when the government is on the cutting edge of technology.
Fred,
My network provides MPLS engineered, 100 Mbps capacity wireless to nine counties in a "flyover" red state. My communities served are as rural as they get. My service runs $20 to $40 per month, and smokes the tired old DSL and cable networks. In most communities, I have between 12% and 33% of households. My competition believes a fractional T1 512 Kbps or 768 Kbps is suffient to serve 100 households with an advertised rate of "1 Mbps download speeds!"
My state government doesn't even know I exist, per their "state of broadband 2004" December report (yes, I've yelled at my lobbyist for not helping these clueless souls understand there's a new market out there they've missed). Granted, when a public utilities commission flunkie only contacts incumbant telephone monopolies and cable TV operators, they're going to miss emerging networks just as a 1990 survey of mainframe computer manufacturers would fail to discover this new fad called the "personal computer."
I've yet to find a government agency that has a clue. When you get into your career after college, you'll discover that the people that are good at what they do get jobs in the commercial sector. This is because they can pay them well for their ability. Those that can't end up in government jobs (please note I'm not including educators in this definition; education is unfortunately the victim of a nationalized market).
If you want your Internet done by someone who failed out of college, believes that telnet is fine for remote administration and SSH too much work, and thinks that traffic engineering is less fun than cutting out at 3 PM and hitting the golf course, then use your own money to buy this inferior service. Please refrain from forcing the rest of us to buy inferior products as we sort of have a clue.
Yes, because we all know that private companies are always the greatest for competence and customer service. In fact, the last three ISP's I've dealt with...
Wait...had morons who wouldn't know a processor from a hard smack across the forehead. And when I've worked on government accounts to service datacenter UPS's, the admins there are generally smarter and better then the equivalent corporate ones.
As to "forcing" you to buy something? Parent indicated a CITIZEN REFERENDUM OR INITIATIVE putting the taxes for this service to a popular vote. If people don't want it, it'll fail overwhelmingly and no one will be "forced" into anything. And if it passes, and the government service sucks as badly as you think it will, private companies will come along and offer better service and make tons of money. Of course, if the government service is as good as promised, problem solved.
You so-called "lovers of the free market" are the ones who tell us that it's OUR problem to figure out how to get health insurance when it's prohibitively expensive, and OUR problem to get a job. Well great, fine. Then it's the CORPORATION'S problem to figure out how to break into a government's market area, and if they can't, well, there's the free market, and some have an advantage where some don't!
Stereotypes and joking aside, not all government employees are idiots, and CERTAINLY not all corporate employees have two braincells to clack together.
And before you start in-I'm a private sector employee myself.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
This topic was covered on PBS' NOW program last weekend.
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcriptNOW108 _full.html
Short version: Corporations are trying to pass laws restricting what duly-elected officials can do (viz, starting up wireless public networks), EVEN AFTER they have refused invitations to provide the service. (There's a story in the program about a small town that no company would serve, despite being asked, and how the town council did it themselves... and then the telecoms went to the statehouse to try and make what the council did illegal. Interesting.)
"There is real incentive to make something efficient from a business standpoint, because your customers see the real cost of the service in their bill every month."
Yeah right, tell me another one. You obviously don't pay a cable or satellite TV bill every month for a basic package. In case you haven't noticed they are routinely jacking up rates faster than inflation by a substantial amount, and the quality of the channels and programming they provide is either staying the same or getting worse. They claim they add more channel but neglect to point out most of the channels they add are garbage.
Since 1996 when rates were deregulated they've gone up 50%, three times inflation, 150 channels and there is still nothing on worth watching most of the time.
OK so you are paying maybe $40 a month for this fine service. We are talking basic cable. Pretty much every channel you get on basic is laden with commercials so you get to pay twice, both for the service and you still have to watch programs laden with ads.
Ever watch TV late in the evening or early morning. Nearly every channel is running infomericals all night not to mention most packages carry a half dozen shopping channels which are basicly infomercials 24x7.
You want efficient cable/satellite then make them sell you each channel individually and if you don't want 3/4 of the channels they provide you pay 1/4 of the price you do now. John McCain among others have tried to push this in congress and the TV/Satellite companies kill it in short order.
"but since it's in taxes, you never actually know this"
Bah again. Any city worth a plug nickel will have the costs of the service broken out in black and white in its budget. Wouldn't take much more for them to provide usage statistics on numbers of users and bandwidth used.
"And, things will never get better, since commercial providers can't compete against "free". Everyone loses."
Well actually no. The only losers are private companies that want to rake in a lot of money on internet service. Internet access IS a lot more like essential infrastructure today. Any kid in school needs it for research and if they don't have it at home they are forced to libraries or to do without. Most cities do provide internet service through libraries at taxpayer expense already, you are just saving people from having to go to the library and queue up to get it, assuming you can swing a second hand computer.
If you make each household pay monthly the affluent get it, the poor don't and you just reinforce the digital divide. If it is done through taxes everyone has equal access.
Wireless access points are cheap, there is so much dark fiber sitting around bandwidth is also cheap. Its key you don't have to run something in to every home. Just setup evenly spaced access points. It is totally rationale and efficient for cities to provide this as a public service.
Cable and DSL will never be able to compete against wireless, free or not, so they have a lot to fear. They have to run copper or fiber in to every home, send crews around to hook, unhook and repair every home. They have to spend a small fortune mailing out bills, cashing checks and dealing with deadbeats. The can't beat public wireless on efficiency, how its paid for.
@de_machina