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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?
Well, it looks like yesterday's zombie lurch accomplished something for the city!
Now even the Windows boxes will turn into zombies
I could just imagine this scene. Brainnnnssss......Brainnnnsss.... Oh my god run for your lives! ZOMBIES.... Wait, what are they doing now? I think they are reading their e-mails, whooo... thank god we are safe for now.
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
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.
Hmmm... No tax dollars being used, sounds good to me. How are they getting funding? A subscription fee or what?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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.
There needs to be a reason for a small town to become ethnically diverse. A lot of non-whites live in larger cities because there are lots of jobs and lots of non-whites with whom they can relate. What you're suggesting is more drastic than bussing folks around for a mix of races at schools.
Put a server chip in each of them. Then we can play zombie wars.
.... i wish :/
(untill then i will just have to stick with my $2 a month, 100mbit internet)
Officially: "No comments"
WiFi even at G levels has a maximum bandwith of 54Mb/sec, which translates to about 6MB/sec. Wow, 6MB a second, that's better than most cable systems, right? Wrong. 6MB a second for the access point. This is divided up amongst all the users within range, and possibly over a significant area if each individual access point doesn't have it's own 6MB/sec Internet connection.
In a real-world implementation with some kind of mesh network and relatively few hard-wired connections between them, you are going to quickly run out of bandwidth when people use this as an alternative to a wired connection. Therefore, this isn't any competition at all and serves to just allow people to connect when away from home.
The likelyhood that this will be used as a cheap alternative to a hardwired connection is high. Therefore, there is a high likelyhood that the service will suck from the moment it is turned on.
Of course, if you don't have any view to the south you're still screwed.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
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?
I'm very interested to see how this plays out and how effective it will be. I've spent a lot of time in madison (my girlfriend lives there), and it's one of the most spread out cities I've seen. They apparently have a law there (or city ordinance?) that no building can be taller than the capitol. It seems like having a city be so spread out would present some problems to deploying wifi on a large scale. Another thing is the UW campus takes up a large part of the downtown, and a large percentage of the people who hang around downtown are students. So, don't most already have wireless through the university? Is there really a need for city-wide wireless? Just a few thoughts.
The Bridges of Madison County!
Oh boy that joke was so bad I posted as AC...
...and the folks who worry the most about opposing ethnic diversity are often the ones who strive the hardest to spin the words of those they think they disagree with.
Reread the words you originally commented on: I care far less that there is little diversity here than I do that university and city officials pretend there is diversity where there is not.
If you want uniformity of thought, visit the hard-line conservatives that make up the majority of the rural and small town areas outside of Madison (and exist throughout most of the 'small town midwest'). Representatives from those areas are (and always have been) strongly bothered by the notion that a fairly progressive city (Madison) and county (Dane) exist right in the middle of them.
This cultural clash between the rural conservatives and the 'urban' (heh, as urban as Madison can be...) liberals is also one of the main reasons why this area is so minority unfriendly. Conservatives hoping to keep minorities out and liberals urging the importance of bringing minorities in debases the fact that we're all human, and ideally should be treated as such.
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LegendMUD
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.