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SF Wifi More Than Flipping a Switch
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is carrying a story looking at the costly rollout of the Google/EarthLink SF Wifi project." From the article: "EarthLink said it expects the project to run to between $6 million and $8 million in initial costs, which include attaching radios and receivers to utility poles throughout the city. Within 10 years it expects the whole network, complete with upgrades and maintenance, to cost about $15 million. Finer financial details of the project haven't been made public, but the plan calls for EarthLink and Google to contribute to the initial cost of building the network. It's not clear what the split between the two companies will be. Once the network is built, Google will pay EarthLink for access to the network on a wholesale basis. In order to make access free to people in San Francisco, Google will use revenue generated from local advertisements to pay for access to the EarthLink network."
WiFi B/G (the 2.4 GHz spectrum) has only 3 non-overlapping channels: 1,6,11. Linksys sets their equipment to default to 6. I'm not sure about other vendors.
Where I live, in a small town in Idaho, there are three wireless networks in my range. Mine and two neighbors. There are half-a-dozen downtown and maybe two dozen more around town. NONE of them, except for mine and one neighbor's are secured at all. 90% of them have the SSID of "linksys" and are sitting on channel 6, stomping on each other.
Connectivity from even two houses down is abysmal and frequently you will see your connection hop from one to another, and I don't mean seamlessly, either.
How is Google/Earthlink going to handle all the people who already have WLANs? Are they just going to pick a channel like 1 or 11 and say "sorry, we're here with the strongest signal"? I'd be strongly tempted to switch my personal stuff to the 5 GHz band (Wifi-A), but that wouldn't be cheap as I'd have to refit a Tivo, two X-Boxes and 3 PCs.
WiFi is a freaking mess and can be a source of no end of issues. I wonder just how Google is going to deal with all that.
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