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?

Comments

Done right for once, I think.

[Ironsides]

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?

Milwaukee To Get Better Treatment

[SEGT]

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.

Good news

[cdrguru]

This is perhaps a competitive service to cable and DSL. Unfortunately, it is probably just that, with lower capacity. Let's see, what happens when there are 20 people on the same accept point? You get something that works fine for someone in a Starbucks trying to read email and something that doesn't work at all for downloading the latest 12MB update from Microsoft.

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.

Re:Rah-rah Madison

[mjh]

I thought the FCC made a rule saying that no such restrictions were allowed:

The rule applies to individuals who place antennas that meet size limitations on property that they own or rent and that is within their exclusive use or control, including condominium owners and cooperative owners, and tenants who have an area where they have exclusive use, such as a balcony or patio, in which to install the antenna. The rule applies to townhomes and manufactured homes, as well as to single family homes.

The deal here is that you have exclusive use of the area. I've even read of people placing their sat dishes inside a south facing window in order for this rule to apply to them.

Of course, if you don't have any view to the south you're still screwed.