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Orlando Cancels Free WiFi Project
EvilStein writes "According to local news, the City of Orlando has cancelled the city WiFi project. The 6 month pilot program ran for 17 months instead of the planned 6, but in the end, it was costing the city too much money and very few people were using the service. Might other municipal WiFi projects go the same way?"
From the article: But city officials said that only about 27 people a day took advantage of the program -- not enough to justify the $1,800 the city paid every month for the service.
Maybe naively I've been waiting for the propogation of wireless to be everywhere and always available and if not free, at least very inexpensive, and ubiquitous. The quote above snapped me back to reality. Sure wireless everywhere is the buzz these days, but how many people really need, or want it? I would venture even in the techno-elite slashdot crowd many wait for wireless everywhere but only a relatively modest subset of those would actually use it, and of all who use it, it would not likely be at great volumes everywhere (as in, that's kind of what it needs to be to sustain and maintain the infrastructure).
Wireless internet isn't the same as cell phones in the sense that wireless access to the internet is nice, but doesn't drive communications as does telephony. Wireless internet access is a nicety but until wireless folds neatly into existing or expanding other necessary infrastructure (e.g., cell phone) I wouldn't be surprised to see other experimental free wireless internet sites suffer the same fate (really the question asked by the article).
If a city as large as Orlando didn't sustain the experiment there are many other cities that would point to that as justification for not even bothering trying, at least not in the near future.
(Doesn't mean I don't want it, just means it's too niche-y a market right now.)
...you let the free market handle these situations. A bunch of Government Beauracrats spent oodles of taxpayer dollars, and ran the project almost three times as long as promised, and the taxpayers basically got bupkis. Private industry knew better than to waste money there. OTOH, if I'm within spitting distance of Schlotskies in this town, I get free high-speed wifi.
I live in Kansas City. If the city put in free wireless in our downtown - nobody would use it. There's nothing in our down town to do .. after 5:00PM (except buy drugs, hookers, or be on a cleaning crew).
A city running something like that would give me the willies anyway. Who's to say they wouldn't be monitoring every piece of information - and/or someone sitting there with AirSnort doing the same..
= Grow a brain...
-William Brendel
The real problem with this is how cities in the US are laid out. Cities in the northeast may have a lot of residents per square mile, but almost every where else, cities are very spread out. Maybe I'm only speaking for Miami here, but if you put WiFi in downtown no one would use it because nobody lives there. What is the city of Miami only has a population of 400,000. It's Miami-Dade County, where everyone inside considers themselves to live in Miami, which has the large population (2.3 million). Anyway, for this to work it's got to be done in residential areas, which are too spread out in most US cities (including Orlando).
Although subsidized-WiFi isn't as important as subsidized health, housing, education, etc... at least it's a public service subsidy. Most government subsidies just go to a few corporate stockholders.
If you're going to push something like this in the civic sector, you need to push the non-laptop uses ... kiosks, for example. At malls we're starting to see health & human service kiosks provided by non-profits & public agencies. This would be a lot cheaper to do if WiFi was pervasive.
Potential such as new ways of spreading knowledge and teaching subjects - the wikipedia concept is a superb working idea as an extension of an encyclopedia, and it's an idea that can be expanded further. Beyond detailing and linking concepts, the simple idea of teaching someone based on what they know could be one such branch of such developments. Many new elemental ways of using existing knowledge more freely and appropriatly have yet to be touched, or are even possible before we build the concepts needed to reach them.
It's not so much that we have some isolated potential we don't care about - it's that we have huge families of ideas that we won't even know about until we step back into the the idea of the advancement of human knowledge.
Well, it's not combat, it's trying to build the public will and eductional environment so that we can bring the a-political progress that seems to be stagnating in our self-distracting society. There are far better priorities to consider than the combat and pure-market mentalities we have settled into, in my mind - though I'm open to argument. It's about ending the short-sightedness that seems to be cutting into the long-term benefit of everyone, especially the market at large.
Just my opinion: Without one new government program or non-conservative change, a simple shift in the interests of politicians and citizens back towards an interest in human progress would bring back something we seem to have lost for too long. I don't care about the politics, only getting away from the stagnation we seem to have fallen into.
Ryan Fenton