Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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 already read the Atlanta RFP. If you had read it in detail, you would see one of the few things they are able to offer as incentives was use of THEIR towers as broadcast locations. However they aren't usually all that well-sited for this particular need. What's a good tower height and location for a HF-radio system, may not work at all well for a GHz system. We ran a quick budget because the Atlanta neighborhood WISP I work with was interested. The numbers quite frankly suck.
Again, many of the "wireless" versions of solving the last-mile issue boil down to one of these:
1) Duplicate a bunch of corporate services
2) Put a gun to the head of existing companies and tell them "offer freebies or else"
3) Nationalize private-owned networks
Anyhow, we took a pass on the whole thing. Quite frankly there are going to be some vultures who will suck up the funding for this. They are ethically-challenged enough to play the game where the city pretends they are getting a great deal on your service, while actually money is passing hands in all kinds of funny ways and creative billing lets you bury in some dial-tone fee or some crazy junk like that to actually make some money on the deal. Because you know the way the politicians have to pitch it to the voters is it'll be CHEAP. We ran the numbers and there were very few incentives, a LOT of risk, and absolutely no will from the city side to offer any guarantees. We could spend a lot of money, be forced to operate at very minimal profit levels with a lot of oversight and junk to deal with, with no payoff down the road. Ultimately any rational being has some idea that if I slave away for 5 years there should be some payoff for this. Not as far as we could see, it was just maybe you'd get to keep slaving. No thanks.
You want my favorite bit from the crazy laundry-list that was the Atlanta RFP? Read the bit about maintaining WiFi service in moving vehicles. Obviously written by politicians without technical oversight. It simply is not possible to have continuous WiFi signal in a vehicle driving rapidly around a large urban area. Someone was thinking, well it works for my cellphone so those smart-boys can make it work for the WiFi card in my laptop too right?
What is proposed about network security? Do you want the municipality/state handling the security of your connection and the helpdesk? To get adequately skilled staff and support, they'd have to pay well ... means more taxes of course or less often garbage pickup.
/., so I can't believe someone hasn't raised the issue of a government entity (local nonetheless) overseeing the network. Of course ... we, the people, are supposed to constitute the government, and should hopefully be more involved at the local municipality and state level. This issue would at least get the geeks involved in local politics.
... yes, the cell providers would just as soon become the WiFi providers, or make WiFi obsolete and provide access over their WANs etc.
And this is
But lest I get too far off
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
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.
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/
UTOPIA is a beautiful thing. I had it for about a year and a half (Murray, UT - just moved, no longer avbl to me :( ). Lots of negative advertising by Comcast about how it will ruin/bankrupt/whatever our city, but they are obviously running scared. Reminds me of the movie Head of State ('He's for CANCER!').
...). Comcast started offering their $70 plan for $33/mo (+ taxes) to try to compete (UTOPIA is $40/mo taxes included through xmission) but it's still only 7mbit (lucky to see 4 in my experience) down and 768 up (they actually get pretty close to that, again, in my experience).
On UTOPIA, I got 15mbit each way, seeing sustained downloads of ~11mbit from usenet (uh, doing a lot of reading
Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this the sort of muni internet access talked about above? AFAIK (IMBW), the city ownes it & ISPs sell access to it.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
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.