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Dayton, Ohio: Free City-Wide WiFi
_Bunny writes "The City of Dayton, Ohio announced a plan to make all of downtown a WiFi hotspot - and as of last week, the network is live. This makes Dayton the first Ohio city to offer free WiFi access. Approximately one square mile of downtown is now live, including Fifth Third Field, the Oregon District, Webster Station and RiverScape. The WiFi project is a public/private partnership not funded by taxpayers, and comes at no charge to the end user." (According to the linked story at WHIO-TV, the city is actually paying about $5,000 per year, with advertisers picking up the rest of the tab.)
So what happens in any legal suit where there is unmonitored, illegal activity taking place over this network? Is the city liable?
Is the city monitoring the traffic to prevent kids under the age of 18 from viewing illicit material?
Will the RIAA come after them if someone uses this hardware to download illegal songs?
To get attention. There's no way the broadband industry will permit this. Check the massive campaign they've done (via Republican legislators) in Philadelphia and Houston to prevent municipal WiFi there.
OK, so it's still on the 'build it they will come' notion / gamble then. I still don't see the great need for being connected like that all the time. I see wide open, anonymous access for hackers, virus authors and identity thieves. Of course nearly any WiFi access point qualifies for that.
I also see a viable network for distributed RFID readers to access their database back ends to make for greater ease in people tracking. I see web cameras, rather than the more costly dedicated units, all over the place, and the US becoming like the UK. I see the back end capability for the advertisement boards like in the Minority Report movie.
All of these things are intrusive and to my mind not good. And I'm by no means a luddite. I can just see no good coming from this. Granted other than reasonable free Internet connectivity.