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The Hiccups of Free Wi-fi for Cities
smooth wombat writes "Several cities around the country are considering implementing free wi-fi for its residents. Currenly, St. Cloud, Florida is the only one that can make that claim. However, the 28,000 residents are still experiencing hiccups in the system more than a month after implementation including being able to see receivers but not being able to connect or connecting at different times with weak signals or not being able to connect at all. As a result, many residents are still paying for monthly landline connections.
HP, which has been contracted to build the project and provide customer support, says it is working to resolve the issues by adding more access points to improve signal strength in isolated parts of the city. Despite these issues, HP says that there were only 842 help-line calls out of more than 50,000 user sessions in the first 45 days of service."
Heh, just last night there was someone on the mediawiki IRC channel asking if his Free WiFi Lan wiki project was a good idea. People from here should go there and give this project a boost. Check it out.
Ironically, someone asked the guy if his server could take a Slashdotting. From talking to him through email it seems that will will be fine for a comment link.
I would be suprised if there weren't hiccups in a rollout this large. Give it six months, and then we'll see. Until then, let's all reserve judgement.
Free as in Beer? More like...
Free as in at least two million dollars in capital outlay and $400k annually (and they're probably underestimating). Free as in: people using it don't necessarily pay for it, and people paying for it don't necessarily use it.
That's not a definition of free I can accept.
BZZZZZZZT Thanks for playing!
Sunnyvale, CA (a city of 115,000 people) has free city-wide WiFi, too.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Actually I would remove the "Despite these issues" and "only" portions of the text in this submission. That's an average of about 19 calls per day and a call every 59 sessions. That's rather high, but then again it's based on about a month and a half into a new network. Extrapolate this out if the subscriber numbers were significantly higher and their help desk would be a bit more busy than that even. But it's a new install and sure there will be hiccups. But HP doesn't need to polish the rough edges by putting spin on it.
Before any of the "you get what you pay for" comments come out, of course someone is paying for it.
It's paid for via taxes. Therefore the taxpayers should solicit the local city council for action since taxpayer money is being used because it is being paid for. No one should be putting up with these many problems, especially if the entire city is having these problems together.
I'm not pro or con the whole city wide free wireless internet thingie, just pointing out some facts.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"As a result, many residents are still paying for monthly landline connections."
Is this surprising, or some kind of a sign of failure? I think that free city-wide Wi-Fi is a nice idea, but I still wouldn't surrender the autonomy, privacy, control and efficiency of my own pipe.
b
"there were only 842 help-line calls out of more than 50,000 user sessions in the first 45 days of service."
So almost one in 50? I'd say that's pretty shitty when you consider a lot of people didn't know the number to call except... hmm, maybe by looking it up on the INTERNET? Let's also not forget a lot of people wouldn't have tried it out until after they were away from their homes and actually needed the net.
Nice spin.
More than a month?
A month is not a very long time for a new service to get it's act together.
If you assume they deployed the equipment and started offering services it is quite likely they are a) inundated with customers, b) brand new equipment failures, even if only 5% causing untold grief. c) limited experience trouble shooting the network since it is brand-new.
Initially when my parents signed up for Cable modem service I warned them to expect problems for the first few months. There were a few minor hiccups, but over all there were no significant problems. Had I not warned them (the service was brand new) they would have been far more concerned about the minor problems they experienced.
But at least they have the comfort of knowing they're paying more for the service than they need to. And since it's a tax- (or debt-) funded service, they get to keep paying too much for it, unless they can somehow find a politician who will vote to reduce a budget.
HP says that there were only 842 help-line calls out of more than 50,000 user sessions in the first 45 days of service.
ONLY 842? 1.7% of ALL CONNECTIONS resulting in a service call is piss poor, even assuming that people are going to call every time there is a problem.
These are the same problems plaguing WiFi in general. I haven't setup a wireless network and have had the same results each time. I have worked with some pretty lousy equipment (ahem, DLink) and the problem is exasperated when the router itself is defective.
Even once set up, walls, wireless phones, other wireless computer equipment all can interfere and make WiFi problematic.
The problems experienced by muni-Wi-Fi is just a high concentration of the same kind of problems people will experience individually, just on a higher scale.
If its free, don't complain if you get intermittent interruptions in service or poor quality. Complain when you have to pay for that privilege.
Lastly, can we give up that stupid "free as in beer" crap? In the real world (i.e. outside college and univeristy), beer ain't free.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
In my city not only is the Wi-Fi free, but it actually turns a profit for the city, who resells bandwidth on it's fibre ring that powers it to local companies.
In essence, the city is acting as an ISP. The ISP offers free bandwidth to residents, and leases surplus bandiwdth to other companies.
It can also be seen that, even if a city did not turn a profit on it's own network, the increased tax revenue from people migrating to the area because the WiFi is there couldpay for the cost of the network.
I am not saying that this is the case in this particular city, I am just pointing out that free Wi-Fi can be a win-win situation for all residents if you have smart people in charge of the thing.
Signal strength is only a very coarse indicator. Like anyone who's tried to use the free wireless in Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) knows, you can have great signal "strength" and still not connect. Signal Strength has no way to measure interference. If anything interference will likely increase the signal strength.
In this case, if your wireless software will display good statistics, you'll notice that most or all of your packets are coming in with CRC errors, so are worthless. It could be reflected signals or other RF sources jamming the signal.
In my recent experience in PHX, I could see the antenna about 30 feet away, if I leaned forward. The view was obscured by the concrete column (that I was plugged into), plus there was a phone card vending machine right there as well. I eventually notice there was 100% CRC errored packets received. I speculated either the rebar in the column or possibly an RF source in the vending machine was the culprit.
After relocating to another gate area, I connected right away.
I suppose the airport's RADAR could also have been a contributor. I know it can cause interference in my Bose noise cancelling headphones!
Someone said they would get rid of the wifi hiccups, but then I was told, 'Don't hold your breath.'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
in New Orleans, city's top IT manager is now fighting to keep a free municipal wireless network functioning at high speeds. http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/s tory/0,10801,110773,00.html
More info :
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/services/200 6-03-28-new-orleans-wifi_x.htm?POE=TECISVA
Talk about needs... Hmmmphh
Your argument could easily be applied to public roads. I don't own a car, yet I'm forced to pay for them. I would hope that you are consistent with your viewpoints and are against public roads as well, as they are not "free" either.
Wow, this sounds almost as bad as when I have @Home cable modem service :)
Constant disconnects, huge drops in bandwidth, clueless technical support. Except I was paying 40 bucks a month and locked into a year long contract.
There are a bunch of hotspot lists, including wireless anarchy. Hell, I even provide a hotspot list, but we get ours from people wardriving.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
You also have to figure in PEBKAC errors. Which if my years of helping family and friends out with computers is probably 90% of the calls.
Remember when broadband came? I do.
An uptime of an hour was rare. An uptime of a day was unheard of. Downtime of a day, on the other hand, was quite common.
You're complaining after just a month? Don't tell me you already quitted your cable provider, thinking that this works "out of the box".
Seriously now. Cut 'em some slack and let them iron out the wrinkles. If they don't improve after 6 months, you have something to complain about. But after a month? C'mon, be realistic, this is more or less uncharted water they're trying to wade in.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How many droppped calls? How many customers hung up before they got to talk to an analyst?
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
My city (Fredericton, N.B., Canada) has had a similar service in place for a couple of years now. The network does not yet cover the entire city, but I believe that they're gradually working up to full coverage.
One thing I find annoying is that while officials are bragging about how 'forward thinking' and 'progressive' Fredericton is, there are wide gaps in the residential areas of downtown, while almost entirely useless spots like the river are entirely covered.
Trout's epitaph: Life is no way to treat an animal.
Anyone that has ever tried to setup a WiFi network to cover a large municipal area knows that it's essentially IMPOSSIBLE to make it work well. WiFi is just to sensitive to interference. Trees and building stop WiFi in it's tracks. The only solution is to flood the area with access points, which is so expensive to do that it's not practical.
Supposedly WiMax has better coverage, but honestly, until the FCC opens up some of the lower UHF/VHF frequencies, wireless internet access "for the masses" is never gonna work right. 2.4Ghz is just too high a frequency to push through stuff.
From what I gather, there are only 3 practically usable channels (1, 6, 11), it has an inefficient collision avoidance method, its bridging capability causes exponential bandwidth decay with the number of hops, and it uses open frequencies that are also used by wireless phones, etc., thus being susceptible to interference.
Just give us fiber to the home already. We've already paid for it in the form of tax breaks to the telcos.
I'm no economist, but what happens if this model of free wifi takes hold on a large scale, to people like me who want a static IP address and want control of my own router to manage traffic for various web/file/content servers, as well as remote (and secure) access to my machines?
Assuming demand for pay services like Comcast broadband drops significantly, does that mean prices will necessarily jump? Or is there some alternative outcome that I'm not seeing, that allows for prices to remain reasonable for the relatively few home broadband users who will still want to pay for their service (but who don't want to pay business user prices)?
madclamor.com
Grand Haven, Michigan, has had it's wireless network up for almost 2 years now (July 2004). Granted, it's only about 12,000 people, but I would say it still qualifies as a city.
I work in municipal government in Florida. We looked at free wifi and came to the conclusion it's too expensive to cover massive areas and has little gain. We are mostly done with covering city hall and the outlying buildings (the ones within about a 1/4 mile). I live in a pretty wealthy area and it's still just not worth it to cover the whole city. We are looking at expanding to some of the areas with coffee shops near the water (we don't have a downtown), but that will probably be it.
We are hoping to blanket the city with either WiMax or 802.11n and understand those technologies are a few years off. We see no point in covering the city with 802.11b ever. The range is just way to short. We'd need hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to blanket it. And for what? Slow internet that drops all the time?
I personally think it's a huge waste of tax dollars. It isn't going to kill anyone to wait 4 years for wimax or 802.11n. These technologies are meant for this sort of thing. 802.11b never was and does a very poor job at it. I would be upset as a citizen in a city that wasted tax dollars on this sort of thing.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
The correct spelling (although both are valid, granted) is hiccough. It's one of the 11 possible pronounciations of "ough" in English and is far cooler (In my opinion). For those of you who prefer the easier more phonetic spelling go to Spain or Wales as both Spanish and Welsh ARE phonetic languages. (although the dd and ll may confuse some of you). enjoy
It can be argued that public free roads are the major cause of traffic, along with being vastly wasteful. I have a feeling that if you gave google 257 billion to build highways, they would be incrediby better. besides, as there are hundreds of competing routes to any particular spot, toll costs would probaly be reduced to pennys per trip, without traffic.....
I don't know about you guys, but I've been to a couple of sites where finding the support or contact number is nigh impossible. That support call rate could be high or low, depending on how easy it is to find that support number in the first place.
I've often wondered about the state of p2p on these networks. Are they largely anonymous? What's to keep me from buying a pcmcia wireless nic and then use it to do all kinds of illegal activity like download child porn, break into government computers, run botnets, upload viruses or even (shock, horror) download mp3s off Kazaa? After committing my crime I could throw the NIC away and have nothing to tie me to the crime. Even worse you can spoof your own random MAC on some Linksys NICs, so you can keep doing it again and again without buying new hardware. Is there some kind of mechanism to prevent this?
'The staff in the hand of a wizard may be more than a prop for age,' -Hamá, the doorward
My roommate Rashid Ahmed is Sr. project coordinator for the Unwire Portland project. The city just signed with MetroFi. Project should be rolling out in the very near future!
http://www.pdc.us/unwire/faq.asp
First, the average computer user has no sense of how latency impacts their experience (exception: gamers)
There's latency for a given pair of packets, and then there's latency for an entire transaction. For instance, on the web, click a page and wait for it to load. Overall latency for the transaction is time from mouse up until the HTML, CSS, and most important images are displayed. This will be faster even on capped DSL than on dial-up.
Does the number of calls to the helpline sound a little low to anyone else? I'd be willing to bet that if they included the number of people who lost their minds while listening to the hold music (occasionaly punctuated with "Your call is important to us...") that number would rise significantly.
This space for rent...
Strike two. Another Sunnyvale resident that lives north of the railroad tracks. Their advertising claims that it's "available" in Sunnyvale, but if less than half the city is covered, even that unqualified claim seems misleading. Sure it's available, just not for you.
Life was better when we had Metricom. It was slower, but ran on 900MHz for better home penetration, and their protocols supported mobility.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
Do these cities with free wifi access have an intrusive monitoring policy, is there an EULA for usage, or is it basically, you are using the government's shit and we can do whatever we want on it. This is why communications has always been a privatized industry. As someone who has helped design municipal communications architectures (Emergency band, New York City), I'm not a big fan of making them available to the public.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
I live in Santa Clara CA. This City, Cupertino and Sunnyvale (not dale) are all under a free WiFi umbrella from a company called MetroFi (has for over a year). So St. Cloud is neither the first nor the only. Google. will soon have MountainView online, as well. Yes there are hiccups. However the original premise that St. Cloud is the first is off kilter a bit.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I can't wait for the outrage later when it is discovered that various agencies at the local, state, and federal levels use their ownership of this "free" internet to trample the hell out of the users rights. Hopefully they will do it in new and interesting ways, like charging you sales tax for something bought from out of state, or asking you to report the income on an in-game gold sale, or flagging you as a trouble maker for reading 2600.org.
"Your honor, as you can see from these records, the defendant followed a link from Digg to a story about medicinal marijuana. He is clearly preoccupied with drug use."
Use the internet of the state, expect no rights or privacy, no matter what they say. 3 years from now, when another administration comes into power (at whatever government level, from either party), they can and often will rewrite the rules.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the free wireless network covering 600 square miles near Hermiston, Oregon.
Won't this just interfere with everyone elses WiFi? What if I want to run my own wireless network? Obviously there are lots of channles to choose from, but won't they pretty much dominate them all due to the nubmer of hotspots?
So, according to the abstract on the article
..."
... do all the users that attempted to connect, but were unable get counted in the user sessions? "Sessions" makes me think the user connected and was in good shape, in which case, he probably didn't have a problem. It would be interested to see how many tech-support calls there were compared against the number of attempted and/or failed connections... I think at least.
"there were only 842 help-line calls out of more than 50,000 user sessions"
Problems included....
"...being able to see receivers but not being able to connect
So
-w
calling all destroyers
the ISP can do nothing about this 'latency' except to raise bandwidth.
True, but not all bandwidth is created equal. Burstable bandwidth improves latency of human-interactive transactions, which improves the experience in World Wide Web and e-mail. Sustained bandwidth is useful primarily for running a server (no-no under TOS), reselling the connection (no-no under TOS), peer-to-peer file sharing (which is the same thing as running a server), and streaming feature-length videos. It's possible to roll out 6 Mbit down yet still cap users at 15 GB/mo if an ISP forecasts that users of web, e-mail, and similar services plan to burst for a total of only 20,000 seconds in a month. As long as the ISP spells out the bursting policy in TOS and doesn't advertise uses that require sustained bandwidth, no fraud occurs.
The really awesome part of spending in the public interest is that there are usually residual benefits even for those people who don't directly use the services.
Public roads? Lubricates the commerce (at the very least), which makes the economy as a whole better for you to participate in.
Social security? Keeps the unfortunate & market-abused from being too much of a drag on society and potentially a destabilizing force; IOW, it keeps society secure for you, too.
Subsidized communications (incl. wifi services)? Facilitates democracy, free flow of information, not to mention commerce like roads & public transport also do. Which makes the economy and your democracy all the better, even if you choose other avenues to participate in commerce & government.
I don't understand the fascination with all these cities wanting to offer free wi-fi for everyone. Do they want everybody surfing the Web all day long sending e-mails or checking stock quotes, etc? What is that supposed to accomplish? Why don't these cities offer free cellular phone service as well? That sounds like it would be more useful or even free cable TV.
Most of you may have heard of New Orleans and their wireless network. Works fine, thanks.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So what is it based upon? 802.11b/g?? Ohhhh that is the nice to have technology colliding with cordless phones, microwaves, loads of wireless cameras, some bluetooth and a load of other 2.4Ghz technology. Or did they use 802.11a?
Currenly, St. Cloud, Florida is the only one that can make that claim.
Bzzzzzt! again
Spokane, WA has citywide free wi-fi too. Or for 100 blocks of the downtown anyway -- though it's 2nd or 3rd largest city in the state, as opposed to a small town where the entire area would be covered.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Yea, there's lots of fibre, but wired links are supposed to be for high-bandwidth usage. The whole idea behind wireless everywhere is that it's just simpler; no more cell phone or landline phone -- just wireless. Cable can still be delivered via video-on-demand over fibre, but for surfing the web, VOIP, or email, you want wireless.
WiMax has multiple channels, better signal qualities, and TDMA (instead of CSMA) at its core, allowing you to get better network throughput as you reach (and exceed) subscriber maximums for an access point. WiMax is also fairly close to being easy to buy. I just wish governments hadn't commited to using the (broken) 802.11x set of protocols to implement wireless.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
So that's a 1.6% rate of failure to please the customer. Whatever happened to 5-nines?
___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
The true first is the community of Hermiston, Oregon (or, more technically accurately, Morrow county, and a little bit of Umatilla county,) has had a true 100% coverage over 600 square miles. Read the NY Times article (use BugMeNot's suggested user/pass combo of 'spambobby' and 'password', they work.).
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Marquette Michigan is one of those cities that DOES have a working WiFi network almost citywide. The Northern Michigan University provides nearly complete WiFi coverage throughout Marquette and plan to complete this coverage soon.
In regards utility services, including Telcos.
fact is the cheapist way to provide such services is by a govt monopoly paid via landrates or consolidated revenue (ie income tax)
Take a hypothetical case of a city/county/district/state/nation-wide region where 5 competing networks of similar size each provide full region coverage, each holding about 20% of the market in the network region. Now compare that to a govt telco monopoly with the same city/county/district/state/nation-wide coverage, but instead having 100% of the market. In such a situation the private networks that only have 20% of the market have virtually the same costs as the govt monopoly that holds 100% of the market, but have to spread those costs over a much smaller user base.
Remember in regards things like public utilities, telcos & network infrastructure the economies of scale of govt monopolies are king, easily beating the multiplicity of waste from the unnecesary redundency of private companies competing in the same market.
Sure govt statutory authorities may potentially have higher labour costs but that's more than neutralised by other factors. For example statutory authorities are exempt from local govt zoning laws, can obtaine financing at lower interest, don't pay taxes, have easy & cheap axcess to govt land & private land through eminent domain, can share costs with other govt depts & statory authorities (for example offices in govt buildings) & need little marketing/advertising overheads. Plus revenue via landrates or consolidated revenue makes accounting much cheaper as there's no billing or user account overheads
Fact is the only reasons why many of the worlds utilities & govt telco monopolies were broken up & privatised was because of the now discredited neo-liberalisation ideology of the economic rationalists, the greed of those trying to make a quick buck & politicians wanting quick cash from privatisations to pay for election promises. Hence we have lobbying by upper management in corporatised govt utilities hoping to get the huge payrises & stock options that privatisations bring, lobbying by the business communty because of the big fees that can be made by those in the finance, consultancy & securities scene from privatisations & finally lobbying & backyard deal making by politicians, party faction leaders & bureaucrats with the aim of retiring into a consultancy or company board or being owed a favour by those that do.
Notorious for downtime.
When people were having nightmares with their cable modems (esp. Excite @ Home) I had DSL. And it was up all the time, and still is.
If I say reliable, do you think of your cable service or your phone service first?
The phone company(ies) had been providing 99.999% reliable service for years before broadband came about. And in the same time cable companies had been earning a reputation that made them the natural business for Dr. Evil to specialize in (joke from the first Austin Powers). So it isn't surprising to me that the initial broadband offerings from the phone companies greatly outclassed the cable companies' efforts.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The goal of these kind of networks is to provide WiFi access to the community, not do some sort of Proof of Concept network. It has to be practical, and people must be able to use it. It doesn't matter
Besides, these kind of projects usually depend on government funding and corporate sponsorships to get things off the ground. They have little money to spend and must spend it wisely. 802.11 does the trick, and it is cheap as hell. Same goes for the people who are using it. If using the network is free, it shouldn't require a $$$ purchase just to be able to access it. Especially since there are no guarantees on performance and availability.
If prices drop and availabilty rises, WiMax will surely be a good candidate to supersede 802.11 for these kind of networks, but it's going to take a few years before we're there...
xmax will be the next wireless internet access technology to put the eyes on. Even wimax, will be put behind. no frequency band licence is needed, very low power, very cheap devices, any one could install an ISP, interesting signal range, what could we want more ? :)
e less-broadband/
N ewsID=4722
please check it out!
http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/05/xmax-cheap-wir
http://www.xgtechnology.com/
http://www.techworld.com/mobility/news/index.cfm?
http://www.codingheaven.net/