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New Report On Municipal Wireless
PublicNet SF Coalition introduces us to a new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance called "Localizing the Internet: Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem." It makes a strong case for municipal ownership of new wireless and fiber-optic networks. The history shows that there is a need for more aggressive public involvement in broadband deployment, and the affordability of wireless is a great opportunity for this.
Haven't we been hearing for 5 years now that Muni-WiFi is going to solve all our problems? Yes there are some fools who think because they can setup Aunt Mildred's WiFi-router, that they are now well-equipped to cover a city! Issue of interference, maintenance, management of free-loaders, paying for 24x7 techs (think AT&T linemen) and consequent insurance costs, etc. never seem to enter their minds. I read the RFP for the City of Atlanta muni-WiFi and couldn't stop laughing. For all the freebies and conditions they wanted to layer onto it, there was no contract lockin as incentive. Meaning you could spend years and get a network setup, then the next administration rolls in and says hey we are changing contractors because my cousin knows all about computers, please hand over the keys. Now, where's my flying car?
this is a great idea. It's not about ownership of the network, but innovation on top of that baseline platform which is important. When everyone has access, the quality of services increases for everyone through competition. Well, at least, ideally.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The article mentions wireless as a solution, but is not the focus of the article. Overall, this is an incredibly vaugue policy puff-piece. It seems "for" city ownership of networks mainly by comparison to things cities already own like roads and sewer systems. I'll note that it studiously avoids the obvious comparison... TELEPHONES! Why don't we talk about case-studies of cities owning phone systems in the public interest. That would be directly applicable experience to running a complex network. It is conspicuous for it's absence.
The Wellington (NZ) council is looking at rolling out a regional fibre network, on top of CityLink (http://citylink.co.nz/) to ensure widespread broadband access because a decade of private enterprise has singularly failed to provide it. However local whiners the Association of Progressive and Residents' Associations says they will fight it ... because of visual pollution caused by an additional overhead cable.
For anyone who's been to Wellington, a dense, hilly city built on hard clay and rocky soil, there is no other feasible way to connect properties - and there are *already* shitloads of cables, so one more ain't making a damn bit of difference.
This'll be blocked by a combination of private interests saying stupid shit liek `public ownership == communism' and short-sighted interest groups.
L
I'd like to see this work, but I worry that the power of the lobbies will take will hand the benefits to big business
Having grown-up in post Thatcher UK, I think many of us have been forceably persuaded of the benefits of capitalism, so it is strange with this report and the earlier one about cellphone companies seeking to smother wi-fi, that the USA is often moving from capitalistic competition to a (post-capitalist) monopoly
This is a worthwhile dream...
if "Faith" could be proved with facts - would it still be faith? So why does "Faith" try to present beliefs as fact? -
The government has done a great job operating the public school system, maintaining the levees in Louisiana, and keeping civil order in Iraq. Why not have them run the Internets and everything else as well?
It is not simple to plan and deploy a wireless network. You need to secure broadcast sites, do frequency planning, power planning (too much power and a neighboring cell will see too much interference), and cell planning (which includes specifying sectors and antenna directions), and this is typically done with specialized and often proprietary topological modeling tools. And then there are the issues of lost connections - either from a poor deployment or new-building construction that can lead to shadowing of your signals from a transmission tower. Finally, just whe you get the bugs out ~ time to upgrade and add more cell sites. As far as infrastructure (computer & transmitter) costs, one sees maybe 20% for equipment, and 40% for site rental, power, and backhaul costs, and 40% for frequency licensing on a monthly capitalized basis. So owning the equipment is not a big deal ~ owning the spectrum and owning the rights to the transmit locations and backhaul is really what you're owning. Most importantly ~ making it work 24/7/everywhere is NOT EASY.
If each locality tries to develop their own expertise in site planning and deployment and maintenance, I fear that municipalities will be overrun by a sea of mediocre engineers with an overly limited worldview ~ that cannot be improved by deploying networks in tens or hundreds of cities, with lessons learned which are reapplied to new deployments.
I see it today in our cable television monopoly, which is municipally 'outsourced' to a cable provider. This is what most municipalities will end up doing if wireless is publically owned. Our service provider, Time Warner, is too stupid to make our cable modem work. One day, the signal is 20dB at the house, the next day, -15dB at our house. Ok, forget the cable modem. We recently upgraded from analog TV to digital TV and now they are too stupid to make all the paid-for channels work. I am talking literally 5 separate visits from field technicians with no progress (except one technician dumped a DVR at our house an upped our month bill!) As a result, we are going to switch to a satellite provider. The satellite provider has a Network Operations Center (NOC) and can afford to staff the NOC with the PhDs who built the system so that everything in the satellite system works, period, end of story. Unfortunately, a municipally owned wireless network will probably be staffed by yahoos with little knowledge of what it takes to make a system work.
The article may be vague, but the report is quite specific and detailed. There are many case studies of publicly-owned communication infrastructures, some offering telephone services. There is also debunking of industry-funded studies claiming failures of projects which are actually succeeding.
As I read the report, I found myself constantly nodding my head. It sounds like it was written by a Slashdotter (but then edited for clarity). This report lays down in plain language every single good reason why communications infrastructure, including both wireless and fiber, should be publicly owned (not necessarily publicly operated). Every public official from city council members up to Congress needs to read and understand this report before they make policy decisions on these issues.
Firebug. It will make your jaw hit the floor.
Here's an RFP for Atlanta: Rather than build a completely new infrastructure for a city-wide WiFi system, let's pay all the cell companies to offer the service through their existing antenna locations. They already have most of the issues you've mentioned solved, merely increase the bandwidth to each tower, add a centralized login system, and you're gold.
Oh, wait...
Aren't the cell providers already planning high-bandwidth services? At least two different flavors? Don't they have it rolled out in a few places?
Why reinvent the wheel?
The forces for this are those who stand to benefit from it the most, obviously...we the [geek] people. The rest of the world think they will get better service by paying for it.
The forces against this are the usual suspects who also, coincidentally, require the pressure of law to require that they build infrastructure to slowly escallating minimal standards. They also work the hardest to prevent the municipality from owning the infrastructure they, themselves, do not want to build. If they build it, they will have some control over it. Why they aren't rushing to build these things up themselves, I can only guess. First guess would be because it's cheaper to hire lawyers and lobbyists to prevent the infrastructure from being built than it would be to build it themselves to prevent the municipalities from building. If I'm guessing correctly, then I'd say this is just another example of howcorporate interests are too often detrimental to the public interest. They need to be checked.
I guess i wouldn't mind that either -- if i were an ISP.
One other issue that hasn't come up yet is convenience. When i cancelled my parents' overpriced and underperforming Charter internet service, i had to drive an hour to Charter's "local" office to do it. I could have walked to city hall in 10 minutes.
What exactly is the Broadband problem? You mean the hysterical stories spun here on Slashdot every 3 days or so?
So what you're saying is that because one profit-driven monopoly failed, a service-driven monopoly will also fail.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I don't have any mod points today, or I'd mod the parent post up; not necessarily because it is a great or insightful or even funny post, but because it doesn't deserve the 'Flamebait' mod someone gave it. "Macz rule, PCs sux" is flamebait. "George W Bush is a baby killer" is flamebait. A factual, on-topic post like the parent is not flamebait, even if you happen to disagree with the opinion it presents.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
There have been some successes. Lawrence Freenet has been running for a couple years now. The service is reliable and costs less than the local cutthroat cable company. The staff is friendly and works for LFN because they love the idea of a community wireless project. Its been great to watch them grow from the office in the founder's garage and the only vehicle his beat up Winnebago into an organization with an office, high-end equipment, quality staff, and some nice new vans. But they still have the Winnebago. :)
As screwed up as the state of Kansas is, we got this right. Community wireless internet that works. There is a consulting company founded by the same guy that dreamed up Lawrence Freenet called Community Wireless Communications that helps set up municipal wifi networks. They are a good resource for cities that want to enjoy the same success Lawrence has with community wireless.
could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons...
I want to be retired when I grow up.
If people want city wide WiFi they should start a company and sell subscriptions. Cities should not spend a single dime of tax payer's money for this nonsense. If WiFi is such a good idea investors and consumers will embrace it and it will grow. The city should be worrying about arresting and prosecuting criminals and making sure that people can walk outside. Legitimate purposes of government are defense and justice - everything beyond that is theft.
I'll do even better and stick to the topic by pointing you towards two projects that provide municipal FTTH. Both projects prompted the telcos, to call the state legislature and attempt to legislate these projects out of existence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IProvo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTOPIA
Time for me to link to the locally spawned OSS mesh software. The basic idea behind it is that everyone is a node, or can mount a node up on their roof. The software utilizes the HSLS algorithm to self-optimize the layout of the network. So once you've installed your node, you *are* the last mile solution.
http://cuwireless.net/
Could you give an example of what sorts of tools are used [for Wireless network topology design]? It sounds as though you're talking about cellular phone networks, which may be a viable model for muni WiFi design, I'm just not aware of exactly how cell networks are designed...
It was my understanding that WiFi networks use "public" frequencies (54Ghz, 900Mhz, etc) - what frequency licensing are we talking about, here? Again, this sounds like a cellular data issue...
Your point about the ineptitude of the cable companies is well taken - Time-Warner is bad, and Comcast is worse, in my personal experience. They have shown themselves to be wholly inept at data network deployment and management, and greedy to boot. Their stupidity is codified right up front into the user agreements, in fact - they try to claim that some particular processor speed and RAM requirements are "minimum system requirements" for network access - as though a DHCP client and a TCP/IP stack required a half Gig of RAM to function...
While many of the slash/geek crowd typically responds w/ l33t h4x0r tales of how they spoofed the system requirements mandated by e.g. Comcast, the fact remains that Comcast will lock users out of the network for showing the temerity to e.g. run Linux or BSD. Again, despite the so-what attitude of the geeks, the problem here is that the [artificial] connection requirements imposed by [specifically] the cable companies are a major component of the so-called Digital Divide.
Comcast declines to provide universal access (i.e. low-income neighborhoods are not served or are underserved) citing lack of users - then proceeds to ensure that no low-income users are "eligible" to use the network, since the minimum system requirements are set to support the $1100 system price-point.
That is, while the low-income customers in my hood may be able to afford the $50/month cable-modem, they probably cannot afford to spend more than $500 for a the computer that will connect to it - if that. So while I can set up and network all the $25 salvage computers we can lay hands on through-out the hood, we can only get hackhaul connection either thru the phone company, or at some point where there I can afford to set up a spanking new Windows box - and if Comcast finds out it's the drop at that point is working as a backhaul gateway, they will shut down the entire neighborhood by shutting down the backhaul network [and probably prosecuting the unfortunate individual in whose name that node is registered].
There is an additional problem that - Comcast explicitly forbade us from using one high-end laptop to provision multiple cable modems. Again, this was not for techinical reasons - they simply want to make sure that no one on their network is spending less than $2k to get conncected, or less than $100/mo for service.
Muni WiFi is the [trivial] solution to this - if the city owns the backhaul connection, and they tell me I can't connect to it, I will sue them. Suing Comcast or Time Warner is problematic, since they simply say "sure you can connect, as long as you have the h/w we specified - it's in the user agreement, if you don't like it, don't buy the service". Which brings us full circle to the real root arguement: Is network access a vital utility as I claim, or is it supplementary consumer entertainment [a function of cable TV], as the cable giants claim?
Note that the experience I'm describing here w/ Comcast is not theoretical - this is [fairly] recent experience - Time Warner didn't prohibit low cost connections, but does not support them - which is
"The Internet is made of cats."
Sure a public network might be more likely to provide universal access (IMO, that's the only valid point in the whole article). OTOH, a public owned network would almost certainly be BAD at: controlling costs, customer service, innovation, network maintenance, and quality. If all you want is universal access, leave it private and legislate that one aspect. If you want to ensure "net neutrality", you can legislate that as well. Personally, I don't see why this is something that needs to be regulated. I live in a rural area, and while I can't get cable or DSL, we get WDSL from a private, local company.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
I wrote an OpEd piece a while back which touches on this whole issue. I argue that instead of auctioning all of the spectrum, the FCC ought to hold back some of the analog TV stuff for Open Spectrum, and instead auction off naming rights. I still think this is a good idea. http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6318921 .html?display=Op+Ed
While I normally consider myself pretty far to the Right on the economic scale, I think there are certainly some areas where there are bona fide public interests, and where government is the most capable agency of completing a project (or is the only one you'd want to own and monopolize the finished product); in these areas it doesn't make sense to not do it within the public sector.
I'm the same, though I am libertarian and believe in freedom including economic freedom I also believe local communities and governments should be the ones that own the local infrastruture. Otherwise you end up with government granted monopolies.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Because individuals nearly always seek profit, the two are almost indistinguishable.
Good will and charity are unstable in the long term, and it would be foolish to base national policy off expectations of altruism.
Yea, I keep hearing about how bad Comcast and Verison are. However, while my ISP is Earthlink, it's through what was Time Warner's Roadrunner but is now Comcast, and my cellphone service is through Verison and I haven't had any trouble with either service.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Not much fanfare.. It's cheap, works, and no need to worry about ISPs gouging the consumer with pricing and routing.
http://www.lompoc.tv/
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Universal WiFi in an urban area is a pipe-dream. Yes you can point to tiny examples here and there like Mountain View where a company with more money than God can make it work, but that's hardly a fair comparison. Downtown Atlanta is not like Mountain View.
Okay instead of Mountain View, let's try San Francisco. That company with "more money than God" along with Earthlink is offering free, as well as a paid for service, wireless there.
FalconShould there be a Law?
capitalized basis. So owning the equipment is not a big deal ~ owning the spectrum
Is this a redhering? TFA says nothing about what radio spectrums will be used and not all radio spectrums are licensed. For instance the wifi frequencies aren't.
I see it today in our cable television monopoly, which is municipally 'outsourced' to a cable provider. This is what most municipalities will end up doing if wireless is publically owned. Our service provider, Time Warner, is too stupid to make our cable modem work.
Your cable is a government granted monopoly. Wireless on the other hand can allow competition. Unlike cable, where you're locked into one provider, wireless tech allows you to choose who will provider your service. "Your service sucks so I'm switching! And you can't keep me from switching because you don't have a monopoly."
FalconShould there be a Law?
A few years back, IEEE-USA did some work on US broadband policy. First, there is the issue of defining "broadband." In the IEEE-USA view, anything under a bidirectional gigabit to the home is legacy technology. Essentially, the "blazing fast" 5 megabit broadband being offered by current broadband providers is dumbed-down compared to what other countries are installing. Note that bidirectional gigabit technology means any subscriber can become a content, applications, or services provider.
Having legacy broadband creates an innovation gap. Innovators in countries with real broadband will think of innovations that won't occur to US innovators because of the speed gap. I have described the difference as analogous to the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower is a fundamental limit in your thinking, you try to develop more efficient ways of hooking up more than one horse to do the work. If you have multi-horsepower engines, then the innovation goes to improving the engines and finding other ways to use engine power.
A concept advocated by many members of the IEEE-USA group that participated in the work was separation of content and carriage. One way to achieve this is end-user ownership. Another (with some issues) is municipal ownership. BTW, we were told that the incumbent telecom companies don't have the money to do real broadband because they still owe billions they borrowed to do ISDN.
We have to get policymakers away from the concept that broadband only gets built to carry one-way proprietary entertainment content (like cable does). With real broadband, the killer app may turn out to be something like full motion family videoconferencing. The technology can support data, voice, and video over a single connection to the home. Also, the end-user ownership concept implies that to get content, applications, or services would require separate arrangements with those providers. That means alacarte entertainment content could be easily supported.
Perhaps if we get real broadband we will see the kinds of $50 per month, gigabit speed, combined data, voice, and video connections we see other countries implementing.
Well, that was sort of why I said "perhaps to a fault." The problem was that, after the Erie canal became wildly profitable (and it was almost ridiculously so; it paid off its initial investments far earlier than expected), people started building canals willy-nilly, without realizing that they were building the 19th century equivalent of dark fiber. They were too late, and competition by the railroads bankrupted most of the canal companies.
However, what's important to note, is that the Erie Canal happened quite late: people had been pushing for it for almost a hundred years by the time they finally got around to opening the thing, so when it became profitable and others tried to copy the idea, they were really copying an idea that had been state-of-the-art almost a century before. They were too late. Had N.Y. State gone ahead with the canal a few decades earlier -- and had it not been for the usual internecine politics, they might have -- people might have realized the profitability of canals and some of the follow-on projects might have been completed in time to make money before the railroads moved in. But, it's a moot point: the problem with most of the canal-building projects immediately after the Erie, was that they were trying to cash in on what they perceived the Erie's success to be, without really understanding why it had succeeded. It was, basically, a bubble; and just like any other bubble, it eventually popped -- but that doesn't mean that what originally sparked the bubble was devoid of merit.
And it wasn't just the Erie Canal that made money; the Champlain Canal and some of the other ones in the system also were profitable (mostly because they were part of the Erie System). But most of the smaller canals that were built afterwards never were, because frankly, none of them were big enough in scope -- compared to the Erie, they were just moats and ditches. Other big projects -- the St. Lawrence Seaway project, the Welland Canal, the Panama Canal, etc. -- were all accomplished with public funds, and were and still are huge positive economic contributors.
But just looking at the Erie, we have an abject example of a situation where the scope of the project was just too massive and too risky for private partnerships to accomplish, although quite a few tried, and there wasn't real success until the government stepped in. But on the other hand, it's worth pointing out that a government agency didn't do the work directly, there was a quasi-private Canal Commission that was slightly insulated from day-to-day politics and which had the construction (and later, operation) of the Canal as its primary goal. The public provided the funding, owned the result, and took the profits (and the risk), but it wasn't run by politicians.
It's too easy to get tied up in polemics and extreme positions. Obviously, politicians are, by and large, idiots, and unfit to manage their way out of a paper bag. However, the resources that Government can put to a task, have traditionally dwarfed what Industry can, and sometimes, it's you need those resources in order to work on a scale that's required to produce the desired outcome. There is more than just two ways, with hardcore free-market capitalism on one hand, and Marxist commu/socialism on the other; history has demonstrated over and over that it's possible for government and industry to cooperate and do things that neither could do independently, to great public benefit.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Municipal WiFi is essentially a call for government owned communications networks.
This has been done in the past many times. Think of all the phone systems in eastern Europe, China and elsewhere. With all the restrictions on their use and supervision and censorship it allows.
Look at what is happening in China, Turkey and elsewhere with govt. owned networks.
And people want that here in the US?
Do you really think politicians will keep their hands off?
Think Bush, Pelosi, Chicagos Daley or any of them woule refuse the ability to monitor what their opponent send and receive?
How badly would San Francisco want to block sites like the NRA?
How badly would Salt Lake City want to ban access to the ACLU?
How about Kansas and pro-evolution sites?
If they own the network, they make the rules, just like the FCC can for broadcasts over the public airwaves.
If you want a free internet, as in freedom to see and publish what you want, you should be adamantly AGAINST government ownership of networks, and FOR as many competing open to the public private networks as possible, in all the various variations, whether Starbucks-like paid access, Panera like free access, or any other variation you can think of.
It is not simple to plan and deploy a wireless network. You need to secure broadcast sites, do frequency planning, power planning (too much power and a neighboring cell will see too much interference), and cell planning (which includes specifying sectors and antenna directions), and this is typically done with specialized and often proprietary topological modeling tools.
Sounds exactly like power transmission to me and for a hundred years, there have been state-regulated monopolies maintaining these "complex networks" using "proprietary tools". Either you're going to have a state-regulated wireless monolopy or you're going to have a nonstate-regulated wireless monolopy which will screw you out as much money as possible before running off to Mexico. The compedence of the engineers does not matter one single bit, especially as this technology matures. I seriously doubt that deploying a wireless network is as difficult as power esp. considering the safety issues. (none) And then you pay taxes to make sure the system stays up and running -> ensuring that good engineers will continue to work and improve the network.
So I call B****hit on you,
Ben
Considering there are only THREE usable fully-separated channels in WiFi, 1, 6, & 11. If you DON'T grant a WiFi monopoly it will only lead to a frequency and amplifier war.
While there might be an initial airwaves war eventually those companies trying to get into the market will sit down and come up with an agreement. If there is no agreement then nobody makes a profit and they will go out of business. And it's not as though a company can pump up amperage because they'd then find themself on the receiving end of a lawsuit. I recall many years ago this guy across the street from us mounted an antenna outside his house which he used for the cb radio he had inside. We knew whenever he went on the air, we could hear him speaking through our toaster, and eventually because of all the interference he was shutdown. The same would happen to wifi providers if they tried to outpower their competition. As it is now some hospitals are banning cellphone use inside because of interference with electronic equipment, and if a wifi provider pumps up the power around one more than likely they'd have a lawsuit slapped on them quick. If not by the hospital then by someone who lost a relative because of the interference.
Also there's not really a scarcity of airwaves. The airwaves were divied up in 1932 with the technology available then. With today's tech more stations can be on the same bands than was possible then without interfering with each other A couple of years ago IEEE's magazine "Spectrum" had an article on this, the technical aspects. Then I think it was last year the CATO Institute commissioned another study which also concluded the airwaves should be redone using today's tech. Simply today's tech allows more efficient use of the airwwaves than the tech in 1932 did, yet we're still using the airwaves as lain out then.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Anyone who wants 1/10th the performance at 10 times the price should consider such a scheme. However even that grimm a cost guess won't reflect but a fraction of the overall cost of such malarky. And, that doesn't include the cost shifting to cover the homeless and total illiterates who must be trained.
'free' internet initially makes sense to drive paid competitors out of business or to keep them from entering the market. Once that is accomplished, the 'free' providers can then start exacting the costs of total government monopoly and control. That's when you find out that 'free' meant free access to your property and freedom.
The only way we can really get the speed, affordability and universal access is NOT by government ownership but with Public Policy that encourages build-out, requires high quality and high speed and supports growth and innovation. A good example that people might want to check out is Connect Kentucky http://connectkentucky.org/ which is sponsored by the state without ownership: "ConnectKentucky develops and implements effective strategies for technology deployment, use, and literacy in Kentucky, creating both the forum and the incentive for interaction among a variety of people and entities that would not otherwise unite behind common goals and a shared vision. This level of teamwork is making Kentucky a better place for business and a better place to live." Also see http://speedmatters.org/ for other examples are PUBLIC POLICY options, NOT public ownership ones. The US speeds are a joke compared to many other countries. We need the fastest internet possible and the countries that have it the fastest (like Japan) primarily use Fiber.