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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
Here in the Bay Area you aren't even allowed to use other search engines. Within a 100 mile radius of Mountain View Google sifts all Internet traffic looks for requests to other search engines. If it finds that you've requested MSN, Ask, A9 or the like it does one of two things
1) If you're using a Windows machine, it'll probably just blue screen you, you'll curse Microsoft, and probably just use Google the next time, I mean, what kind of worthless operating system/browser pair can't even load their own company's search page. Sometime though, it'll do the second option, just to keep people entertained.
2) If you are Linux/UNIX/Macix it renders a custom search page for you that LOOKS like the search engine you requested, but actually returns Google results and displays Google ads. Google considers this a risky play, as they could just redirect you to the Google home page, but they feel its necessary to maintain the cloak on this operation.
Hey, this is just what you do, if you have virtually limitless processing power, bandwidth, and storage.