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Tempe City-Wide Wireless Snags
Triumph The Insult C writes "About a month ago, the dot carried a story about the city of Tempe, AZ, laying claim to be the first major metropolitan area to provide city-wide broadband internet access. Well, things haven't gone exactly as planned, as one of the companies involved, MobilePro Corp, is now being investigated by the state for not holding the appropriate permits. As a resident of downtown Tempe, I hope the rollout isn't successful, as I would much prefer to see a more community-based effort, such as in Seattle, Austin, and New York City."
http://www.tempe.gov/business/wifi/
The town near my aunt's cottage went totally wireless when some drunk driver knocked over the pole that connected them to everything else...
I didn't rtfa though, so maybe this isn't the same thing...
Excellent, now I can take down the protective siding around my house, what with these intrusive waves going away.
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -Mahatma Gandhi
The actual issue seems to be that the company (MobilePro Corp.) isn't registered with the Arizona Registrar of Contractors. The city officals, however, say the company doesn't need a general contractors license, so they are planning to continue with the construction.
This seems to be Local vs. State issue and while the State doesn't seem to be able to directly cancel the project, they can boot the company out of the state, so they'd need a new company to add to the infrastructure as they are planning to build the Wi-Fi.
"Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write it should be hard to understand."
A regulated monopoly run as a for profit company? Why would you dream about that?
My other car is a Popemobile
I currently live in Tempe, Arizona attending the University of Advancing Technology. This seems like a poorly planned project. Already in downtown Tempe stores have free WAP's opened up, ASU has free Wireless all over campus, note its huge 57,000 students, and even at my college, www.uat.edu, The University of Advancing Technology, we offer free wireless access to the community. No one is going to pitch in the money to pay for this service, most consumers have access to the internet via cox cable internet for $40 a month and businesses. There is no incentive to switch over. Our college, sponsered a wardriving project in which we found a lot of information about Tempe and the valley. The project was to map out the whole Phoenix valley WAPS. "The wardriving project is already 1/3 complete, after starting this fall. That was done with a crew of Al Kelly's war rivers who volunteered to set up the laptops (provided by UAT), configure the GPS and wardriving kits. "For the upcoming semester, students will go in wardriving crews to canvas the Phoenix valley and search out wireless networks. The data will be collected and then analyzed against demographic information such as age, income and commercial characteristics of the scanned areas. Wardriving crews have already gone on reconnaissance trips, and in a nearby seven-mile square mile area, found more than 1,000 access points." From my understanding I am sure more people will post from my school but they have found like over 200,000 non secured access points. I bet a lot of people are asking why do we need to pay $40 for city wide wireless since its already being offered free (legally that is)? Thats a good question.
You hope that something that could be useful to many people will fail, just because you like something else? You want to see money wasted, just to feel superior?
Why does this rollout succeeding, stop you from contributing to community efforts? Maybe you should make an effort to do better yourself, with your community ideas, rather than simply hoping that others fail. What an attitude!
... and then they built the supercollider.
I couldn't agree with you more. All rutan did was pay some people to build a sub-orbital space vehicle. NASA funds SCIENTIFIC research in a huge number of fields that greatly advance our understanding of the universe. The whole "NASA sucks" virgin-galactic worship thing really pisses me off. You're talking about one of the largest, most productive research organizations in the history of humankind, and comparing it to a guy who solved a minor engineering problem by drawing from existing technologies. I'm not saying NASA couldn't use some serious reorganization and better administration, but comparing the work of its many talented scientists to a company that built a glorified airplane is foolish, disrepectful, and incredibly short-sighted.
> The "dot"?
The Department of Transportation.