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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.)
I don't know what you mean by city-wide, but Dayton is a big place and I doubt "within a 1-mile radius of downtown" really covers it all. Still, this is cool.
This is a BIG event in history. Quite possibly the largest event ever. For the first time in history, there is actually a good reason to live in Ohio!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Lets all do a parking lot lan party!
:D
Pay 4 bucks to park 24 hours, sit in your comfortable car with a laptop, and game it up on a free network... if only wireless didnt completely and totally suck for gaming
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.
I'm surprised that anyone here at /. would want municipal WiFi, other than the ever eluding Free Lunch. Lets take a look at some of the problems that will arise:
Static IP and Port Forwarding. I'm sure that many of you forward ports through your router/firewall for certain applications (http, ftp...). I can guarantee that the municipality will not support this feature, and it would be impossible to get a static ip. Once the municipality monopolizes the market, there will be no competition from the private sector. You can't compete with free. While private companies in other areas offer new features, lower price and more bandwidth (they have to compete, remember) you will be stuck paying high prices (taxes) for a slow connection. While the idea of other people who don't use the internet paying for your BitTorrent downloads seems like a great idea, it will cost you more in the long run.
Censorship. Once this municipality has the power to decide what you can and can't view on the internet, do you really think that it would never be abused. Some religious group will donate large amounts of money to a campaign, and the politician will have to repay that group with censorship legislation.
Internet access may seem high right now, and it is. Competition is real, prices have and will continue to go down as features are being added. My Comcast connection used to cost $59/mo, now I have more bandwidth and it's only $20/mo. Government is never as efficient as the private sector, it will cost everyone much more to let the government supply WiFi rather than a private company. Also, when was the last time you heard of a government program living up to it's promise? Do you think that this would be any different?