Slashdot Mirror
Madison Rolling Out City-Wide Wi-Fi
It doesn't come easy wrote to mention the announcement that Madison, Wisconsin will soon be home to the newest Municipal Wi-Fi network. From the article: "'I made a commitment in 2004 to bring Wi-Fi to Madison,' said Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz in a statement. 'This is an important new service for Madison residents and businesses.' The Madison network will be rolled out at no cost to the city and the providers have secured initial funding from service agreements from ISPs. The initial phase of the Madison network will cover users in the downtown region of the city with plans to later cover the entire city." I love my town. Zombies and Wi-Fi. What more could you want?
Midwest Fiber Networks is going to build a wifi system for the city at no cost to tax payers. Once the system is up they will rent it out to various service providers who can then charge whatever fees for access they wish. More information found here.
10: SIN 20: GOTO HELL
How about a competitive marketplace for cable television? Charter sucks. Lots. Some of us Madison residents lease their dwellingplaces and are not allowed to mount satellite dishes. Therefore, I, and many other Madisonians, are stuck with over-the-air standard TV or Charter Cable.
Fortunately, I occasionally hear IPTV radio commercials for nearby towns. Hopefully those will make it to Madison before too long.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Any ideas on if they are capping download speeds, blocking ports, or max download per month? Is this going to be an always on 100k speed or what? This probably won't be for anyone beyond the Joe Sixpack user of email, IM and websurfing. I'm pretty sure no one downloading a linux distro over bittorrent isn't going to be using this.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
From what I understand, the standard bandwidth for VHF television will be going away pretty soon to get re-allocated. If the FCC were to allow the bandwidth for just one television station to be used wirelessly, how much bandwidth would that be per channel? Does anyone know?
Could this be a possibility when people decide that 54G is still too slow to serve enough people at any given access point?
Remember Madison is mostly a campus town, unlike say... here in Minneapolis, Chicago, or other Midwest cities of the ilk. That is not to say white people are the only educated people in the world, but there is not a large portion of people there (non-white or otherwise) who are not there for either the government work or the schooling. (sorry about the double negative...)
If it makes you feel any better, I am from a little dinky town in northern Wisconsin with 4K people where 1/3 the population is either Mexican or (mostly) Somali. That is pretty good diversity percentage-wise. However, it is a factory town and the "non-whites" are not there for education as they are in Madison - they are there to work at low paying crappy farm/industrial jobs right alongside white people stuck in the same position.
Is this the sort of diversity you are looking for?
In other words, don't bother looking for free WiFi hotspots in Madison anymore if you are from out of town. All possible incentive to provide it has been squelched by a monopoly, established propped up by the municipal government.
Yay, socialism!
Nah, I think you'll be fine. Almost all of the current wi-fi hotspots in the downtown area (coffee shops, mostly) get most of their business from students at the University. All of the students I know are way too bandwidth-obsessed to be content with municipal wireless, and since they tend to crowd 4 or 5 people into an apartment, a 3Mbit cable/DSL connection isn't particularly expensive to them. Assuming that the municipal wi-fi will be billed per user or per computer rather than per household, it really wouldn't be much cheaper than what they're already getting from the cable or phone companies.
In fact, I'm really not entirely convinced that Madison's municipal wi-fi program will be successful. I'm pretty sure they did almost no marketing research before starting the program (The city's motto, as far as I can tell, is "Ready, Fire, Aim.") Most of the area they are covering is just too saturated with free hotspots and people whose unprotected networks are named 'linksys.' As someone who lives outside the coverage area, I certainly wouldn't pay for it. I'm already getting pretty much exactly the same service for free, though I'll grant I'm not getting it from anyone in particular.
Dvorak had a fit a few issues ago because (Philadelphia?, Pittsburgh?) was going to put up a muni.net and some of the commercial enterprises realized they could earn a lot more by charging what an ISP is expected to charge instead of some paltry sum (or nothing). He later said these folks created some leverage^w^w a PAC and convinced the state legislature to pass some bill which would give the commercial folks the right of first refusal for any of these setups (and IIRC, something ungodly like fourteen months to decide). The Gov signed and Pennsylvania now looks to be locked tighter than a nun.
Can anyone substantiate this? (and how would this affect the apparent plans of a nationwide Google muni.net?)
Nobody really knows. The city government and the company they contracted are being very tight-lipped about the whole deal.
Did anyone notice that wireless facilities is working on both the madison and google projects for city wide wifi? Guess that they must be big players inthis.l
There is no free service for anyone.
Two companies are paying the local power utility Madison Gas & Electric (MG&E) to place the antennae on street lights. At first, it will just cover the downtown area and expand later.
There is no free service. Pricing is still unknown, but it is supposedly going to be competitive with local DSL and Cable services. In other words: Expensive.
Visiting business people will not be able to simply sit in a cafe and hook up. Low income Madison residents will not get access.
This is not a public service. Nobody put up a fuss when Charter started offering Municipal Broadband over cable or local phone companies started offering Municipal Broadband over phone wires, so I don't get why this is such a big deal. This is not a municipal program, it's a commercial endeavor and we're handing over our city to these two companies so they can charge us for WiFi. Won't COST us anything? They SHOULD BE PAYING US!!!!! We should force them to offer a free service to our low income residents to help get them better access to job opportunities.
I fail to see what's revolutionary about it. One can only HOPE it helps to bring down the ridiculously high broadband prices, but I doubt it.