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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."
Or am I mischaracterizing Google's "free service" business plan?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
While I am all for the spread of citywide wireless networking, I would also like to point out there are are still many places here in the U.S. that cannot even get Broadband in any way, shape, or form. I grew up in such an area near Cooperstown, NY. I am glad to see such civic projects brought to you by Google, but I would hope that someday they might reach out to the rural people as they have only dialup. It would also be nice to see this plan implemented elsewhere as well, like Albany, NY...Boston, NYC and the like. Ah well.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
In about 10 years you're going to be able to buy single wireless access points from Best Buy that will cover the size of the city and it's bandwidth needs for about 50 USD.
Not going to happen given how the FCC manages spectrum and transmission power.
While I can understand the desire for the project in the long run I think it's going to look as wasteful as the number of railroad tracks that have been abandoned across the US, and in about 1/10th the time.
I dunno, those railroad tracks might look wasteful now, but they were a huge part of industry and economy in the past. Just because something is going to be obsolete in the future (near or far) I don't think it's necessarily not worth doing.
Railroads entered in an era of ubiquitous travel, perhaps this google thing will enter in the era of ubiquitous net access. (As another stated, some areas have no access to broadband at all.) Personally, my hope is maybe if these sorts of networks are open and usable enough, it will give comcast et. al. the overpriced slap they deserve.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
I hope this whole project does not kill SFLan:
http://www.archive.org/web/sflan.php/
the already existing free wifi network in San Francisco.
I can see the popularity of google actually hurting the development of this grassroots project significantly; even though SFLan is adfree.
A really common type of home construction in San Francisco is stucco exteriors. The chicken wire used to support the stucco is going to interfere with reception.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
As of the year 2000 census the city of San Francisco had 329,700 households. Let's take the worst case and say the wifi project costs eight million in initial costs. $8,000,000.00 divided by 329,700 households = 24.26 dollars per household.
Let's round it up to twenty five dollars and realize what a bargain price that is! For less than a household usually pays for one month of service it is possible to roll out the infrastructure to support all the households in the city. Of course, you have a reoccuring monthly cost after that for the bandwidth the households will be using.
Within ten years they expect an additional seven million dollars in costs, bringing the total to fifteen million. Gee, how horrible to have to pay another 25 bucks or so per household within ten years for this service. It's past time for the cities in America to start providing low or no cost bandwidth as a service just as we have low cost water and sewage service. The ISP's have overcharged for their services for long enough.
I live in Philadelphia where there is also a city-wide wireless push. Again, costs are going to be higher than expected (around $15M) and it is plauged with problems - like WIFI probably won't reach past the fourth floor of most buildings. With WiMAX and 802.11n around the corner, why not wait just a year or so?
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
If they had just taxed 740,000 San Franciscans, they could have raised the $15 million Earthlink says is needed to build the network at a TOTAL cost of $20.27 per person.
That's $20. Not per month, not per year, but for 10 years of free wireless service. Considering the city's tax base works out to $7,100 per citizen per year (paid partly by businesses of course), that's quite a bargain.
The annual budget for San Francisco is about $5 billion. According to the article, the initial cost to deploy this wireless network is estimated at $6 million to $8 million, or roughly 1/1000th of the city budget.
Earthlink has been granted a monopoly on city property and exemptions from certain regulations to build a citywide WiFi network. (Google is just leasing from them.) In exchange, they generously agree to rent the network for $20 per month to an average chump, or at some unspecified rate to Google, who will offer it for "free" to users.
Basic math: at $20 per sub per month, Earthlink only needs about 35,000 subscribers to recoup their worst-case build out cost within ONE YEAR.
If Google is paying them just a quarter of that, they would only need about 18 percent of the SF population, which is right around what they plan to get. Of course, after the first year they are minting money, since by their own estimate the maintence cost is about $1 million per year, plus customer support (only for paid customers surely) and billing.
In other words, the people of San Francisco will pay every single year the total cost to build the network. All this to avoid the evil of taxes and to experience the EFFICIENCY OF THE MARKET.
I am beginning to lose the fervent blind capitalist leanings of my youth because I live in San Francisco. Not surprising that this happened, but I am surprised at how.
Also, it's a fact that wireless broadcast technology isn't going to look like that. By that logic, television broadcast towers should soon be the size of a car antenna, and cell phone towers should soon be the size of a fingernail. These technologies don't seem to be moving in that direction.
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It's a tourist attraction. What is 90% of the bay area going to do, drive 50 miles from San Jose to San Francisco to participate in the Google revolution?
You can add the ubiquitous coverage in airports, marinas, hotels, etc. that have been in place for years and years.
Airports are closed environments and rarely will you find an overlapping network. This is why they actually work. I have no experience with marinas. I have lots with hotels, who go to great lenghts to install LOTS of overlapping access points to just plain drown out all the external signals from other hotels, truck stops, etc. They still have issues and wifi access at many hotels is a royal PITA.
There are hundreds if not thousands of network engineers that do this for a living and are good at their work.
Yeah, I know. I'm one of them, which is one reason I raise the question.
Of course consumer equipment set up by idiots and designed for indoor use won't provide a citywide network.
I never claimed it would. I claimed they would have to compete/deal with all the interference from those that already exist and that all that crappy home equipment will now have a big signal stomping on it and create even more headaches for those home users.
You might need to change what channel you use on your tivo or whatnot. But you'd have to do that anyway if a neighbor gets a new toy.
I did, to 11. I also went and changed one neighbor's connection to use channel 1. I ignored the other neighbor since his was on 6. I secured (WEP/WPA, MAC restrictions, DHCP & netmask tuned down to provide no more than 6 IP addresses, changed SSIDs, etc.) my neighbor's and mine (WiFi-G only as an extra precaution). This helped a great deal, but it took some effort and education on the part of my neighbor.
My situation also works because I live out in the middle of nowhere. I have a friend who lives in a hi-rise apartment in Chicago. He just bought a directional wifi antenna and was telling me that from his apartment he can see almost 400 unprotected wifi access spots. He could hop from one to another every day for a year and never have to pay for a connection again! He was curious as to why he was having so much interference
I have no doubt it will work, but I also think it will -- at best -- provide a minimum level of usability with a bit of a pain threshold. I also think there will be a plethora of opportunities for premium service providers.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Is if they could get it on Caltrain like they have it on the ACE. It's not a lot of square miles.
I'm sure SanFrancisco is already well served with cable and DSL options for homeowners. The people interested in free WiFi access are people on-the-go (laptops, handhelds, etc) and those who can't afford broadband. In both cases, WiFi is the way to go, since the client-side hardware is both portable and low-cost.
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