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Minneapolis To Go Wireless
an_mo writes " According to a Minneapolis Star Tribune article, Wednesday will see the announcement of a request for bids on a citywide wireless access service The city will unveil a request for a proposal for a privately owned, $15 million to $20 million citywide wireless and fiber-optic network to improve government communications by linking every city building, police car and housing inspector. The network would also would be available to every individual in the city for $18 to $24 a month."
I look forward to the time in the not so distant future where wireless internet access is considered an inherent right. Even now, driving around Boston with macstumbler, I can find dozens of open non-WEP protected networks ripe for the taking and so I delude myself these unprotected networks are a purposeful open sharing of bandwidth. Am I the only one who finds the idea of forcing your citizens to pay to join such a network to be a little silly? I guess I think this sort of thing should be a public right rather than an extra cost. Mind you, let's reform healthcare and education first, and give them the kind of money they need, but you know, after taking care of the more essential essentials, free wireless and fiber-optic networks for everyone!
So if every cop car is linked, couldn't you find a way to track the location of each car and then use that to plan a crime? Or see that there are no cars on the road, so you can speed as fast as you want.
Want to empower your citizens or simply want to sell them to the highest bidder?
Sure this simplifies the question, but some solutions ( http://www.personaltelco.net ) work with all the parts of a community ( citizens, biz owners, etc) to create the power to empower, not simply the muni blessed right to make more montly bill paying consumers.
The real question is , what works for your community. In places where there is not a grass roots DIY mindset then the AOLization method might indeed be the way to go, for communities that can raise the populace to action though....oh thereis so much more to be done.
Come to Portland, see the results in progress.
-tom
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
This is the phone & cable companies worst nightmare - they spend billions building their networks and somebody can now undercut their costs with $99 wireless access points and antennae. I think Qwest DSL costs $40-50 in Minneapolis - 2x as much. Still, competition is good - maybe phone & cable companies will step up and we'll see the type of residential speeds that they already have in Korea and Japan here in the US in a few years.
Tristan Yates
FTA: No tax money would be used for the Minneapolis wireless network, which would be paid for, built, owned and operated by the winning bidder on the city's proposal. That is a markedly different approach than in Philadelphia, where the city will own and operate a new Wi-Fi network.
From You:
Kudos to the government for charging monthly for access. Charge the people that use it instead of taxing everyone for a handful of geeks to use it.
The one reason I am not against this implementation. Had they made it free, I would have been pissed. One thing I am concerned about though, how is this network (if it is using standard 802.11 a/b/g equipment), going to be affected by personal wirless hubs/routers? That should degrade/jam performance. They also are talking about replacing police radios (if I understood that correctly) with VoIP radios on this network. Wouldn't that be open to jamming (as in even more so than cellphones) and interference from other WAPs? Or are they going to ban the use of all non-city WAPs?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I'm impressed that so many cities seem to get the idea of blanketing the metro area with wireless, but it also concerns me because the technology changes so quickly.
If Cringely is to be trusted, all these cities are making a huge mistake. 802.11g absolutely sucks for what these cities are trying to do. When WiMax starts being deployed, the citizens of these WiFi cities are going to be mighty angry that these companies are providing a service that is far better than what their legislators are pushing through. In addition, they're polluting the 2.4 GHz spectrum for people who want their own WiFi networks. It's just a bad idea, and there are better solutions in the pipeline.
Didn't Popular Science just claim that Minneapolis is America's most technologically advanced city? Seems like citywide wireless access would be a piece of cake for these guys...
[o]_O
Why would you think that the cities will do this and currently AT&T,MCI,Level3, etc. wouldn't or don't do this? Do you think that they value your privacy so much they wouldn't comply with such an order?
If the NSA wants your data, they're going to get it. A network such as this makes that no more or less likely.
Take your tinfoil hat off at the door.
I agree that they are looking for problems in this regard, however it should idealy only degrade performance. Unfortunately the real world experience proves otherwise.
The city doesn't have the authority to regulate the ISM bands, so there is not telling where this could go.
Not to mention that HAM operators have precedence and very few restrictions in channel 1.
I don't know is Cringely is ever to be "trusted", but I happen to think he's 100% correct in this case.
Out in Bloomington (a Minneapolis suburb), I've already got 2.4 GHz noise fouling things up to the point that my 802.11g hub has to be located almost dead-center in the middle of my house to reach every room. I would hate to think what would happen if the city started spraying competing signals all over town.
Fortunately, it doesn't look (yet) like Bloomington is jumping on the bandwagon with Minneapolis. As part of the same county, we often get sucked into their bad ideas (such as building a new ball park for the Twins), but hopefully we will stay out of this fiasco.
As I said in another part of this thread, I don't think I would buy this service even if it was available to me, as the DSL connection I have now is well worth the higher price.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
can we really expect privacy on the internet?
Essentially government is intruding on our privacy to combat terrorism at every turn they can. they want your information and are attempting every legislative effort to get it.
Whether or not your line is municipal is a moot point. they can get your info if they want it by enforcing gag rules on laws, such as a ISP being forced to divulge your information AND not being able to telll the target of the "ivestigation"
Given that assumption, I think MUNI is a great idea. It has become a commodity and an essential service. Everyone should have it, or have access to get this basic information utility.
Foston
I've lived in Minneapolis all my life, and I'm here to tell you that free wireless is a natural outcome of our longstanding populist/socialist traditions.
Free market, my ass. If you want to live in a better world, instruct your government to tax you and your neighbors -- then spend that tax money on a better world.
-kgj
-kgj
I've said it before I'll say it again, even if it is a little off-topic. Technology is not neutral. It has shaped our brains themselves at least since our ancestors started making stone tools and decisively affected the course of language development.
Nobody's sure how pervasive high speed Internet access is changing our lives and our cognition (though people are researching this) but it is simply wrong to assert that the technology is neutral and that only the way it is used and the economic arrangements surrounding it that have an ethical slant. By expanding the world of human action and thought in certain ways but limiting it in the others, technology is never morally or politically neutral.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
I take it you're unfamiliar with the Shoreview antenna farm to the northeast of downtown Minneapolis? That's where the serious broadcast facilities are. It's a cooperative venture jointly owned by KSTP-TV, KARE-TV and WCCO-TV, the local ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates. They're the highest obstacles in the metro area, as any pilot can tell you.
just read through the comments, didn't see anything about this...
how are they going to enforce log-in? That is, when I have my 802.11b network setup at home, i simply use WEP and MAC filtering to ensure that no one but me can connect to my router. But if it's open to everyone, how do they make sure that only people who paid can use it?
There's a local free service in my city (Montreal) that has wireless for cafes, and it's pretty cool, but kind of annoying at the same time. When you connect, the first time you try to access a page, it directs you to a log-in page. Then you can browse as much as you want, but every 10 minutes or so it'll direct you back to the log-in page. It's okay, but I wouldn't trust it not to interrupt me during.. i dunno.. online banking or something.
Also, if they do use WEP or something, they can't very well give each user their own key. Besides, it's pretty well known that WEP can be cracked. Couldn't you listen in on conversations around you can grab people's passwords? Forget paying $24 a month, I'll just figure out someone's log-in and use their access...
I remember back when everyone was using dial-up it was always possible to get lists of people's log in names and passwords, which i guess were leaked from local ISPs, and people would use them instead of buying their own accounts. I can see this happening even more easily with wireless.