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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
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.