Slashdot Mirror
Municipal Wi-Fi Networks In Trouble
imamac writes "According to an AP story, municipal Wi-Fi is going nowhere fast. A think tank research director quipped, 'They are the monorails of this decade: the wrong technology, totally overpromised and completely undelivered.' Subscriptions to the services are much lower than expected and lawmakers are concerned that millions of dollars will have gone to waste that could have been better spent on roads or crime-fighting. Satisfaction with the quality of service has also been low, which give some insight into the low adoption rate. Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
The WiFi will go to Shelbyville!
But they put North Haverbrook, Ogdenville and Rockaway on the map.
Government Doesn't Work!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"I'll say anything if you give me money."
Goatseeeeee!
Gay Nigger Anal Action
>> Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
Or that its something new, and will evolve in due time?
hippy using wifi in a coffee shop? Kick him in the fucking teeth, that's what.
As a tech, I'm dying for these things. I'm getting more and more wireless networks where it just doesn't work because there's too many people with wireless devices in the area. I had one house with 6 wireless networks in range, cell phones, wireless security systems, 2.4 Ghz wireless on the land line, and even a few wireless mice and keyboards floating around. It was too much.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Let me say this, Metropolitan networks, whether Wi-Fi or otherwise need one thing to make them both competitive and financially viable; the metropolitan network needs to be owned by that cooperative body within the municipality's control. That means every last 'last mile' connection.
When the city/county (whatever) owns all the last mile physical plant/infrastructure and ISP's simply rent connectivity to end users the municipality will be functional and profitable. Yes, that is how we would see big bandwidth to every home, and each home would have the choice of ISP services. It is possible to do this and would instantly flatten the cost of entry as well as the rules of engagement.
Then, if you ad Wi-Fi support to parts of the city that is subscribed to by users who already pay... well, it's not such a stretch to support financially.
Does anyone see any downsides to this?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Google's wifi here in Mountain View is not very good. I can't get any reception on it, and I live less than a mile from their headquarters. If even Google can't get it right, city governments probably . . .
The rest of the above sentence is left as an exercise for the reader.
The major issue has been that they have given the contracts to implementors that are paid for the number of radios that they install and by gosh they will install more radios than anyone every imagined. But, see, the 2.4Ghz bands were already polluted BEFORE they started and installing 2.4G radios on every block for several square miles when each mesh radio has a practical range (line of sight) of around 20 miles is really not helping things. And just as bad, the backhaul of the mesh radios is almost always 5.2Ghz or 5.8Ghz, which have only a few channels each to choose from (5.8Ghz has more, but still...)
Don't believe this could happen? Ask anyone that has tried to use the Toronto mesh network downtown. It's flat ugly.
...Steve
Internet as a utility needs time to develop if it is ever going to be adopted. Take a look at my situation. I pay for a cable modem and not for a municipal wi-fi connection. Why? Well, because I occasionally like to watch television and television service is bundled with internet service. If I buy them separately I'm paying a whole lot of extra cash. What would make me change my mind? Well, if I could rent legal TV episodes over IP for a very, very low price akin to that portion of what it costs to see them on cable TV. Until that time, however, why should I pay extra?
There is an entire article on this in yesterdays "Information Week" that I recieved today. Page 41.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
Here in Oakland County, Michigan, they took a different approach. Our nascent, county-wide wifi network was almost entirely privately funded. The county agreed to provide the space to mount the antennas (on land already owned by the county) and to promote it. The actual design and implementation was bid out to the private sector. The winner agreed to pick up the infrastructure tab and to provide free wireless to everyone in the service area. In exchange, they are permitted to offer plans with more bandwidth and traffic prioritization to those willing to pay for it. It's a win-win: It didn't cost the taxpayers anything and we all get free access, and the private company gets to keep any profits that they make from the premium service.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Most other people might have a slight interest in being able to get on the internet anywhere, but not enough to pay for it.
the project get sent to a private company who uses it as a tool to gather demographic information, annd is overly paranoid about the right kind of information.
Let people connect. If you MUST have something, put a 1 page explaination. Period. Then let people use it. If somene crosses the line, deal with them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It was a good idea in some ways, and I'm sure it can be improved more than one thinks. But, more money going to "law enforcement" and other uses is probably not going to happen... even they did, it's not like the streets will be safer. They'll figure out some way to blow it.
"Trillions"? C'mon. They're using networks and getting breaks on prices at the same time. It's not like it's acutally going to be 45Mb connections for each person connecting in the city, as much as a free shitty connection for whoever is desperate.
I understand they're spending loads of cash on this, but it's also a bit of a selling point for bringing new people to the area, and it looks good on paper. They don't care if it's a lot of money, as long as they're known as a tech-savvy town.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
Municipal WiFi is hard. Municipal WiMax would be a lot easier.
...if a broadband or near broadband wireless connection is not available everywhere, then it is pointless. People cannot run their lives hoping to find a connection. Far better to put up with a slower but acceptable 3G or equiv connection through the cell/mobile providers where coverage is often assured. I reside in the UK and have a Vodafone 3G connect doo dah connected to my Macbook via USB and it works like a dream, anywhere I go. Even when it slows to GPRS, it is fast enough to surf most websites. I only use WiFi when back home or at the office where I am more likely to waste time watching YouTube videos and downloading stuff. :-) Seriously, my point is valid and when 4G is introduced (Google Samsung 4G trials), that will be it for public WiFi.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
When the internet was taking off, we had great catch-phrases like "Information Superhighway"." Now that's a name I can get behind.
"Municipal Wi-Fi", in contrast, sounds so lackluster, like "Deparment of Leisure Services". Proponents use lame slogans like "Wi-Fi? Wi-Not?" and "Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not useful."
We need something that will make folks excited, like "Naked Bimbos Everywhere".
Best Windows Freeware
It may be a matter of scale and what you are trying to accomplish. Spokane, for example, has a muni system downtown that is free for X hours. They use it as a convention/tourist draw. Bremerton is installing one as we speak for the same reasons. They are trying to revitalize the downtown area with a new convention center/hotel, etc. If the goal is to get people to sign up and pay money so we can make a profit, maybe it won't work. But if the issue is to draw people to the area with a wi-fi infrastructure to suck up tourist convention dollars, then that's a different take on the issue.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
WiMax has its limitations too, and plenty of them. Chief amongst those is that it doesn't work as advertised (3 miles non line of site? In absolutely perfectly ideal conditions, perhaps). It's good... but it's basically good old OFDM re-packaged into multipoint.
...Steve
I thought they'd all be too busy advocating Ron Paul for President.
My favorite quote? We are not libertarians, we are constitutionalists. Suuuure you are.
There have been various articles about it, but I only found one that talked about pricing - $17.70 per month (via thenewsroom.com).
The Army reading list
1. Unlike the free market, they only answer to the people every couple of years. The sellers must respond to the buyer every single day.
2. When government screws up they spend your money to figure out what happened and to come up with a solution. In the free market, you can just change providers.
It is not that City-wide Wi-Fi doesn't work or there is no tech powerful enough to run it; it's just poor implementation and, more importantly, poor advertisement.
For one, rural and suburban municipal Wi-Fi would be a much better implementation because some of these cities are still on the lower-end of personal internet connections (think low-speed DSL...). Running a Wi-Fi network with its network connection coming from an area with a much faster internet connection or a satellite-capable connection could possibly happen...
Also, I live in a fairly popular city in the United States. I believe we have city-wide Wireless internet, but I have not heard a WORD from our city's government (either that or it was taken down). Plus, another poster mentioned a good point that there is just too much cross-talk; I could be in a cafe with Wi-fi enabled, but it will not be that advantageous with the SEVENTEEN other wireless networks that are in the air...
I think this is a case where 802.11a might hold a candle. But that's just me, and maybe it's not right either ;-)
Right - interstate highways suck. I could have built the whole system solo in a week. National Parks - who needs-em. World War II. Give me 100 men with rifles and we could have beaten the Jerrys and the Nips. Nuclear weapons - HA - my own cousin has THREE in his garage next to his GTO.
Hey swallow some assholes book - he needs the money.
"Most people if they are going to do serious work aren't looking to be sitting in a park," said Eric Rabe, a spokesman for DSL provider Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) "They want to be at a desk where they have their papers or business records."
Gotta love that quote. If that's true then why is VZW pushing their much more expensive alternative so hard. If nobody wants it then why is Verizon so worried about competition? (grin)
"Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
Well, based on my experiences with municipal bureaucracies, I'd say yes, yes, and maybe.
http://xkcd.com/386/
A lot of these municipal wi-fi efforts have arisen just because the private sector has failed so terribly to bring decent Internet access.
Hell, scroll down the front page here at Slashdot and you'll see a story posted today about the failure of many ISPs to provide adequate service. Of course, we've seen many, many stories like that posted here. I'm sure we've all got our own stories to tell about the trouble we've experienced dealing with various ISPs.
So every time that somebody comes along and says that the private sector or corporations are the solution to the problem of shitty Internet service in so many areas, I want to laugh right in their fucking faces. Their solution has had a decade-and-a-half to prove itself, and it has failed! It has fucking failed outright!
Now, a government-backed solution may not be the best. But it's far better than what Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, or most other ISPs are offering. We only need to look to Europe to see how our American communication services should be. Over there, their governments tend to be heavily involved with making sure that a quality service is provided. And it's more than just stringent regulation, too. In the end, we see European consumers getting access to far better mobile phone services, not to mention much, much better Internet access than we usually have here in the States.
Sometimes the free market fails. That's usually the case with essential services, of which the Internet is quickly becoming one. So the government tends to be the only party who can step in and make a positive difference.
Municipal wifi does indeed work. Public wifi is an amazing idea. Of course it will be slow at first. Who is this idiot? Comparing monorails to wifi? That's like comparing soda pop to bawls.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6676205.stm "The BBC programme Panorama is to highlight concerns about a lack of safety research into wi-fi networks. "But the Health Protection Agency says emissions are within safety guidelines." etc.
That is my thought as well. Though WiMax sure is taking a long time to ramp up.
Cellular internet may have already taken over by the time WiMax is ready. Though WiMax may get a boost if the cellular providers are the ones providing it, which is likely what will happen around here (WiMax base stations on cell towers, telco offers yet another package to their users).
I'm your LiberNuttertarian Guy!
Are you tired, run-down, listless?
Do you pop out at parties?
Are you unpoopular?
The answer to all your problems is in this little philosophy!
LiberNuttertarianism!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I read this article on the way in today and saw some of the stumbling blocks they hit. One of them was that in many instances the materials the houses were made of prevented a clear (if any) signal from getting through. This requires additional equipment to get it to function. The speeds offered by these services are also usually that all that super. Then it mentions this kind of service has been a possible motivator for the local cable/telephone companies to suddenly offer services in the area. The end result is that there are more choices, but you can't be surprised when you offer crap and no one takes it.
802.11 wasn't designed to be used city-wide. Of course it's expensive and unpopular to try to blanket the town with WiFi, the stations barely enough range to cover a whole house well, much less a whole block. Furthermore, 2.4ghz is way too overcrowded for this sort of thing. Better solutions would be WiMax or a simular tech using the analog TV frequencies when they finally get auctioned off. The idea of Municipal Internet is very good, but this isn't the way to do it.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
better spent on roads or crime-fighting.
Did anyone else instantly think "SimCity" when they read that?
Yeah? No?
I don't see the point of commercial municipal Wi-Fi. A private company is perfectly capable of installing a few hundred 802.11n base stations in the city, unlike the burden of, say, laying down cables or water pipes. Such a solution also does nothing for city visitors, who are more likely to need Internet access in some arbitrary location than residents. Would you want to open dozens of separate accounts for each city in Bay Area? Starbucks hotspots will probably do better for you.
On the other hand, a free service is a great convenience for city residents and, for it's cost in taxes per person, is probably a good saving over cable/DSL. Free Internet can also encourage visitors to spend more time in city's businesses or locate the business in the first place when they have impromptu shopping ideas. In Foster City, there is an advertisement-supported service by MetroFi that I think is a good example on how things should be done.
Simple question is why have wi-fi everywhere in a city? What problem does it solve?
Do people constantly use their computers in parks? On the sidewalk?
Most people use the Internet in their home. A few will use it at a coffee shop or restaurant.
If you want to provide Internet access then a community DSL or fiber network is the place to start. Then selective hot-spots. like at schools, libraries, community centers, and maybe some parks.
Why would I pay for access to a metropolitan wifi network when I have a WAP at home, internet at my office, free wifi and a couple of restaurants I go to, and a browser on my phone?
metropolitan wifi networks are a solution seeking a problem.
Now Monorails are cool. Actually they do tend to be cheaper than subways and a lot more attractive than elevated trains. I think they are a good solution to mass transit. Too bad buses and light rail are cheaper still.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"lawmakers are concerned that millions of dollars will have gone to waste that could have been better spent on roads or crime-fighting."
No, not that millions of dollars will have gone to waste. That "lawmakers are concerned" bit. It gets me every time.
I mean, they took the money from someone, to give to someone else. They're not feeling the pain, and they're not really feeling the benefit. Build the matrix:
Take from me Take from someone else
Give to me Meh! Yay!
Give to someone else Hey! Meh!
Concerned. My ass.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Municipal Wi-Fi Can't Beat Laws of Physics
Companies Grow Wary of Building Out Municipal Wi-Fi Networks
Expert: Wi-Fi Laptops 'Pose Health Risk to Children'
Hackers Target Wi-Fi Hotspots in New Phishing Attacks
Have you read my blog lately?
It didn't cost the taxpayers anything and we all get free access, and the private company gets to keep any profits that they make from the premium service.
/sarcasm on/ /sarcasm off/
And what's going to happen to it once the private company ends up making next to zero profits from it and that it will cost boatloads of money to implement and maintain it?
Especially in Michigan where the economy is flourishing so vibrantly these days...
Judging from the the previous post of the potential dangers of WiFi networks, I think it's good that they're getting nowhere fast.
The wireless industry has worked very hard to inundate us with these technologies so that it would seem ludicrous to question them once they became mainstream. Because after all, once everyone has WIFI, the general population snuggles into the idea that they must be safe if they are everywhere----because otherwise, the government would have stopped their proliferation. Right.
I'm actually looking for Coffee shops with a LAN connection, not a wireless one. And they DO seem to be popping where I live. So yeah, wireless is losing its steam.
Our suburb is scheduled to have municipal online, as it were, in quadrants over the course of this summer. But one thing I've never seen was straight talk about what it will cost:
Lompoc recently slashed prices by $9, to $16 a month, for the main household plan.
OK. Here's the thing guys. If I didn't already have cable or DSL broadband, at $25 I would tack it on with my current provider instead of dealing with yet _another_ provider. At $16 I suppose you will get a great percentage of dial-up people to upgrade. Maybe even a few current broadband customers who want to save a few bucks/month or those who don't have cable OR a land line. But I'm not surprised the response is lukewarm. Makes me think this really does have to be a government-run commodity to work economically.
In fact almost all networks are non-existent in my area. Five houses down the street they can't even get cable modem connections, no T1's, and DSL won't come here either. Sometimes I think I can shout farther than the network goes around here. The only Wi-Fi in my area comes from my own rig with a legal booster amp on it. Some of my neighbors might appreciate my hooking up a yaggi directional to it though since it won't reach all the way down the end of the next block. I'm currently looking for good/cheap community mesh solution and a way to get it connected online, since its just too much trouble for any of the utilities to bother.
As much as wireless has a "cool factor", it still sucks. I can't get my Linksys wireless AP to throw a reliable signal 50ft through the house even after buying high-gain antennae, upgrading to a 3rd-party firmware that lets me double the output power and switching to 5.8GHz cordless phones. A municipal deployment might use better equipment, but dropping several thousand dollars on an access point that might cover a radius of several hundred feet strikes me as... inefficient at best. Considering the signal issues with wireless and the limited about of throughput per AP, you're investing in a dead-end technology that won't ever be able to deliver the hallowed triple-play that reduces customer churn.
Fiber deployments, on the other hand, offer a steady amount of bandwidth and lots of it, enough to offer uncompressed HD programming, 15Mbps+ Internet and voice. Those triple-play customers are less likely to switch providers even without a service contract so the revenue streams are not only larger, they're also more stable. Muni fiber deployments like iProvo and UTOPIA cost more up-front, but they also experience significantly higher take rates.
Muni wireless is failing because cities tried to take the cheap road to better Internet access. Let that be a lesson to those who are too cost-conscious to do things right.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
Ridiculous article yestersay in the Wash. Post about a large outer-suburban MacMansion-style development that is stuck in a 75-year contract for internet/phone/cable. Some years ago it seemed like a good deal since the company ran fiver optic to each house. Now it's a ripoff monopoly. Hard to feel sorry for the MacMansionites, who are busy violating their own association rules by sprouting satellite dishes, and should have known what a contract meant.c le/2007/05/20/AR2007052001724.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
If you don't know about these U.S. developments, almost all the "affluent" growth goes into outer suburbs, while the inner ones, not really built to last, start to peel and crack. Many or most new developments are private entities, with "association" rules and regulations layered on or replacing normal local law.
So if you're looking for virgin territory for high-speed internet service, that's where it is. Or was.
A lot of cities got sold a sucker deal by companies like Tropos which have some badly performing and hard to deploy equipment (among other things they think one radio is sufficient for mesh and access points). But they also have a huge sales, marketing and schmoozing staff to wine and dine officials into signing contracts. So Earthlink is up to its neck in its deployments just trying to get the equipment to function at all.
Whereas other deployments that chose decent equipment like Tranzeo's two radio wifi mesh stuff are doing okay.
'nuf said.
-=[ place
Its just bad timing, not a bad idea. The public isnt ready yet for wifi to become another 'utility'.
Give it 5 more years.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If the municipal wireless is anything like home wireless, then somebody has to go around and reboot all the wireless routers every day. Wifi is one of those technologies that just doesn't seem to be maturing at all. It's like an open source game, they got it 60% working and were too busy playing it to finish it and fix the bugs.
When I can pay $100 for wi-fi in the city, which is quite spotty, or simply pick up Ma Kettle's unsecured router from her apartment on the third floor for free, I'll pick the latter. This also shields me from government snooping, MAFIAA lawsuits, and the like.
If I post a comment that's likely to make me the blunt end of harassment, be it about Scientology or Dow Chemicals, or if I download a song that was just broadcast over the radio for everyone to tape, Ma Kettle will have to fight the lunatics while I'm off posting from somewhere else. This has an even better side effect, since lawsuits against completely innocent people get more media attention and help bring about laws to protect citizens rather than corporations.
Wait, were we talking about wifi?
Dekker Dreyer
I've sold municipal wi-fi to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by gum, it put them on the map!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Hmm. Lompoc introduces a municipal wireless network. Just as the city starts, the local DSL and cable providers suddenly do massive upgrades to their systems. Upgrades that the city has been asking for for years, and that the DSL and cable providers have found it infeasible to do. One wonders whether this sudden change of heart on the part of the private providers might have something to do with the failure of the wireless network, and whether those providers would have had that change of heart if it weren't for the threat of a competitor they couldn't exclude hanging over their heads.
...in Lawrence, Kansas. Thanks to Lawrence Freenet, a 501c3 nonprofit, community organization, we have a wireless network covering almost the entirety of Douglas County. Downtown is one giant hotspot, local businesses have access points, and there are repeaters located on street lights, water towers, you name it. Not to mention their prices beat the local cable company, performance beats the DSL providers, and they are the ONLY provider of broadband for rural residents.
If your family can't afford the fees, they will provide the service for free and even provide you with a computer if your family can't afford that either. No ads, no secret agendas. Just a nonprofit partnership with the city to help people get connected.
No, I don't work for them, so this isn't a shameless plug. But, I was there at the beginning when we were hacking WRT54Gs to stick on street lights, making three mile long shots to test connection quality for rural customers, and getting the word out that this would be a good thing. A year and a half later, there are over 1,000 subscribers. Tell me again that municipal wi-fi is in trouble.
But I don't have any other options if I want something other than dial-up. We live about 6 miles out of town. When SBC hooked up our phone line here at home I asked when they'd be getting DSL out to us. The technician said not in our life time. (I hope to have at least another 40 years in me) lol I don't think they are failing. It's just taking rural families some time to feel that they need something faster than dial-up. In town the municipality has to compete with SBC/Yahoo and Charter cable. Prices there start at $19.95 a month. We pay twice that for our wifi service.
You bring up a good point, which is that the space municipal WiFi is supposed to fill is already being filled by cell providers. Right now, I can choose between any of four providers for 3G access anytime, anywhere (or at least as good as our own teensy municipal WiFi network provides). As far as I'm concerned, areas with decent EVDO/HSDPA coverage have no business going down the municipal WiFi path - government has no business competing with private business.
Is it as cheap or fast as some people want? No. But then again, you're paying the _real cost_ of such service, not just subsidizing it by force. And, personally, $15 a month for Sprint data access over EVDO seems OK to me.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Wi-Fi would make sense for parks, librarys, and schools. Give people access where they congretate, as that's where most time would be spent.
Parks would be great because mom or dad could keep tabs on business while the kids are free to run about the playground. Likewise, other folks could login some time outdoors instead of from a stagnant and cramped office. Why not allow people to enjoy the outdoors if they can still get work done?
Librarys would be good, since it's a quiet study/research area anyways. You could save data on your own laptop instead of losing it on a public terminal. Likewise you wouldn't have to wait, or deal with whatever boogers the last person left on the public terminal keyboard. Also if you're using your own terminal, you also shouldn't be hindered by what someone thinks would be politically correct for you to view. (But this might necessitate privacy screens or something. Who knows?)
Schools would be great as well, provided enough kids could make productive use of it. It works to some extent for colleges, and similar policys could work for public schools just as well. The only downside is that such service is likely to be limited to the more affluent schools, since laptop adoption amongst lower income areas would take longer to catch up without some other assistance. To reduce slacking or less productive use, network accounts might also be limited in access based on scheduling. That way MySpace could only be accessed after class hours, but pages related to any coursework could be accessed during class time. (Some IT should be clever enough to make scheduled privalages a possibility.)
Business or residential areas would make less sense, since both those areas are likely to have their own wireless or wired networks. Why waste infrastructure on places that should be covered already?
" Is municipal Wi-Fi just a bad idea, has it been poorly implemented, or is the technology just not there to support such an endeavor?"
WOAH. False Choice fallacy winner here.
"A think tank" study, eh? I don't have to look at the name, as I can guess. Lissen up; the "think tanks" are really, REALLY well funded right wing propoganda outlets dressed up as friendly wonks. Who's picking up the tab for this "think tank" study? Would that group have a deep interest in reaming us bloody with corporatized, right-sized monopoly services? Uh-yap. Damned near all of the "think tanks" are deeply married to the very wealthy. Their agenda is the ascendancy of their spouse.
The muni services have been litigated to death, and those few who managed to survive are throttled for funds by friendly neighborhood lobbyists working the local governments. What few, very few experiments that exist managed to survive by partnering with some corporation like Google, which kinda isn't exactly a municipal wifi network, but yet another granted monopoly.
Years back I totalled up what Americans have spent on their "free market" net connections. The figure is enormous. I then calculated, on the high side, what it would have cost for the Feds to fiber up every town in the country, Interstate Highway style. I never hear people complain about the highway system, even tho it's cost trillions in adjusted dollars over the last half century and literally rode over local governments. It's not even close. We could have had fiber to the house for a fraction of what we've been screwed for, and for a hell of a lot less than what they are about to screw us for in perpetuity.
Now, we don't even need the fiber to the home; we could build municipal fiber backbones with wifi nodes and even cat5 connections to the citizens. We could do it for, what, a few tens of billions of dollars? And then it would be done but for the maintenance costs. And we'd not have to spend 25-100 bucks - each - a month for crap service. We'd have gigabit to the home or megabit to the air. If we didn't want to make it a "market" system, we could make it free, anonymous, and as capacious as we liked. We don't do it that way for ideological reasons.
The "free market" thinktanks want to hold us upside down and shake the change out of our pockets. They aren't anyone's friends but their investor buddies'.
The article complained that people are not buying in New Orleans. I suppose that's because they have a free wireless network that works OK.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Hmm. I take it for granted that the government is generally both slow and dumb, but any implementation beats my current options:
DSL doesn't reach. SpeedNet is a privately owned WiFi network downstate-only for rural areas, at the rural price: $50.00 a month. And Sprint's WiMax is *years* away.
ANY muni wi-fi service would beat the Comcast monopoly. So just get your act together and make it happen.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Hey, this is better than video cameras all over the city. I mean, justifying the cost of "free" internet is way better than paying for a camera for every 15 people.
I, for one, welcome our Municipal Wifi Overlords.
Perhaps in large cities, like LA and NY, city and municipal management might have real skills and the dollars to invest in Wi-Fi networks. For little Po-dunk towns like Kansas City, St. Louis, etc... I have found too few dollars and too big of dreams have created patchy, intermittent WI-Fi service. Also, there is no advertisement of WI-FI even being available. Several hotels offer their own service, but there is no notification of city-based WI-FI. And honestly, do you believe cities that cannot/will not fix the potholes in the streets are actually going to invest the needed resources to build a reliable WI-FI? They will build an IT disaster that no citizen will know about, tourists will condemn, and it will be a talking-point on their resumes come election time.
Don't get me wrong: I like the fact that they exist. They can, in fact, be done right. They should exist and we need them and other services like them to break the horrific stranglehold legal monopolies like cable and the Bells have over our connections.
However, they can be done very, very horribly. Case in point: Tempe, AZ (think Phoenix) has municipal wireless. They got it right with allowing some free services to everyone (you can visit asu.edu and such without paying), but the service is run by complete morons.
That's right, utter morons. Their "transparent" proxy isn't. If you're having trouble connecting, you'll run into it constantly and it breaks all downloads because it wants to direct you to their crappy page of news and ads and open your originally requested site in a (blocked) pop-up. Did I mention that you get this page sent even when the program you're using isn't a web browser? Believe me, it doesn't play nice with telnet, non-HTTP downloads, etc.
Oh, and if you're having service problems, well, umm, tough. All of their websites only have useful information if accessed over the wireless link. If you go to the same URLs from the web, you get pages of ads. I don't know if they belong to the same company, or if they're from domain squatters, or what, but it really, really sucks when you have no one to contact about problems.
Also, all the links here are unencrypted. Set your laptop up to sniff traffic and you have a goldmine of passwords to steal, you can launch MITM attacks, or whatever you want. Yeah, they use SSL while you log in, but that's not much comfort.
So please, if your city plans on setting this up, make sure it's run by competent people! Otherwise, you too may feel like strangling whoever made that damned semi-transparent proxy and decided to make sure that support was almost impossible to locate, let alone contact.
And if you're ever in Tempe, don't bother connecting to the WAZTEMPE SSID for any reason. I had nothing but headaches trying to use their services and I never want to use them again. Find a cafe or something with its own wireless link. They can hardly do any worse.
The free market is neither really free nor is it what you're making it out to be. In the free market we also see monopolies where there is no alternative to switch to and business behavior which indicates businesses which do not have to "respond to the buyer every single day". It's sad that American memory is so short in regard to the recent corporate scandals (Worldcom, Enron, Exxon, etc.) which dominated the headlines and the lack of structural change that resulted from those scandals. In software, all software proprietors are monopolists; when you choose proprietary software you're giving control of your computer and your data to a monopolist, trusting that that master won't hurt you. This has proven to be an unwise choice.
Public involvement makes American government better and municipal wi-fi need not be privatized to be real or good. I'd much rather have some degree of democratic control over it than to hand it over to a private tyranny where I am at the mercy of an organization where profit means more than my welfare.
Digital Citizen
This is far from flamebait. When it comes to something that needs to help the public in general, the government can be trusted to do it much better than any corporate entity. Roads, parks and military are three good examples. Just because the government can screw up doesn't mean it always has or always will. Municipal Wi-Fi is a good idea, but it was farmed out, in most cases, to groups that have a lot to lose from it doing well, or to groups that didn't have and weren't given the resources they needed. This is an instance of "Crap in, crap out." not government deficiencies.
Clones are people two.
If nothing else, the muni wi-fi forced the commerical players to upgrade. That by itself make the project a success.
Municipalities have limited resources. They need to be marshaled wisely. Investing in widespread WiFi is a bad idea. They will always be behind the technological curve. Maintenance and support will chew up more resources. As soon as a widespread vulnerability is discovered, they will have to spend again to put in emergency fixes. When someone who hates porn takes over, that will be censored. When someone else who hates gays takes over, any material that is ruled "objectionable" will be censored. Think they don't have the right to do that? Someone else will, too. They will sue. And the municipality will blow more resources on lawsuits that they may or may not win.
Let the private sector in. Let them compete on price and quality. Do you think your city would be offering you a free 2 year cell phone for a contract? Or a low-cost one for pay as you go service? Nope. If your municipality was handling cell service, you would be stuck with a 3 pound brick from the 80's. Do you think a municipality could have kept up with all the network upgrades that have happened in the past 20 years? They would be bankrupt. Most are close to it anyway.
So let's avoid the whole scenario where some technologically illiterate councilperson hands the contract to their brother-in-law so the bum can have a job. Let's avoid the inevitable censorship and hassles and property tax increases. Let the private sector in to do it better, faster, and cheaper.
OK, I'm done with my free-market rant.
Association contracts that prohibit satellite dish installations are not enforceable. See this document from the FCC on this. This overrides any contracts or HOAs or CC&Rs in the United States.
Municipal wireless, using current WiFi technologies, is a half-baked idea. Realistically, wireless access points only have a range of about 20-30 feet. It works in homes, office buildings, hotels, and areas with dense pedestrian traffic... But, for the goal of having internet connectivity anywhere, a technology like WiMax or EVDO is more appropriate, because it'll actually work.
No, I will not work for your startup
Muni WiFi creates competition that the incumbent telcos/cablecos have written out of the economy. It supports better roads and crime fighting more economically than just filling potholes and jailing (for a month) criminals and suspects.
And it helps create alternatives to the AP, by increasing neighborhood communication directly among neighbors, without AP's filter.
The AP is clearly siding with its corporate media buddies who don't want the people to have anything like the power the corporations have. But Municipal WiFi, though a whole industry with its ups and downs (amplified by politics and the stakes that motivate AP and its ilk), has a lot of growth and progress. Especially considering its many enemies, most of whom have corporate lobbyists pressed right to the ear of the Bush administration and plenty of Democrats, too.
Muni WiFi has a long way to go, and has to outgrow some plans too ambitious and inappropriate for a public utility. But it's evidently grown threatening enough to AP that we'll be seeing plenty of these hatchet jobs for some time - until AP and its corporate cronies are forced to change with the times they try to change with their reporting.
--
make install -not war
Seeing as how it was the governments that chose who to "farm out" these projects to, and that took it upon themselves to allocate (other people's) resources toward the projects, isn't the projects' failure still an example of "government deficiencies"? The governments were the ones making all the major decisions; they ought to take the blame when things fail as well.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Perhaps because Wifi is entirely the wrong kind of technology for widespread Internet access. 802.11a/b/g were designed for short-range stationary networking such as a house or small office building. Being in the unlicensed "ghetto" band of 2.4GHz, wifi radios have serious problems going through too much solid material, are pretty much stopped dead by mundane things like trees, have to compete with everything else in the 2.4GHz range (including omnipresent microwave ovens), and have crippling federal restrictions on transmitter power. A lot of people wanted to make municipal wifi work and I applaud them, but their solution to overcome Wifi's inherent problems was simply to dump hundreds of radios all over the place and pray that it would work. And they lost that bet.
If anything was going to make community wireless Internet access work, it's WiMAX, which fixes many of these problems. In particular, a community could be served by a *single* radio. And I hate to be a doom-sayer, but I predict that WiMAX is going to be dead in the water soon now that the cell phone companies are starting to offer reasonably-priced EVDO plans.
I actually use GoogleWifi as my connection at home even though it was never designed for that. They say it's an outdoors network but they give you suggestions on how to connect. I use a PepLink 200 and a flat panel antenna to connect. Initially the performance was incredible. Nearly 1 Mbps up and down. Over time it kind of degraded. I'm situated midway between two APs with lots of trees in between so it's not optimal. The connection strength varies with time of day. It's pretty bad late at night. Sometimes I can't connect at all. Rain can degrade it as well. I don't know why it varies with time of day yet. My guess is that it's when most traffic from other networks occur around those hours. 2 AM is a good time to connect.
Pros:
- Free
- Fast
- No monthly fee
Cons:
- Unreliable
- High equipment cost, depending on how far from an AP you are. It costed me $250 to get started, which is 5 months of connection. Overtime, it's definitely more cost effective.
If you happen to be close to an AP, you might not even need anything extra but performance degrades quite a bit with distance and poor line of sight. I don't have LOS to the AP but the signal bounces enough that I can connect. One possible way to fix this is to involve the users. It would be nice if people who can connect reliably would open up their APs for others and relay it. Google can give out the routers on condition that you share the signal. Just an idea. I do plan on doing that as soon as I can get it all working well.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
More roads and cops hasn't really panned out in the long run for us either. Unless our suburban sprawl and failing public transit systems are considered successes. Lets build more prisons to stuff all the people stealing private wifi signals :)
I would rather pay a high upfront setup fee for free wifi, than a monthly charge to a corporation that needs to make money.
Let's look at this:
Find a government employee that you would hire to do a job.
Find a politician at any level that you would trust to be in charge of ANYTHING.
Now, let's make it a little more complex by adding millions of dollars, multiply it by several thousand government employees, and let's throw in hundreds of politicians. Let's make it really entertaining by throwing in the left wing news media that is fed by the hands of BIG GOVERNMENT.
Most of you people have this belief that because the government is throwing money at technology, that it's a GOOD thing. Frankly, I know I don't want the government to "invest" in anything. I want them to provide roads, police, and jails. If I want Wi-Fi, I want a private company to invest their money, and produce a service that is WORTH paying for. In fact, I'd like 2 or 3 companies to come in and COMPETE with services, that way I can buy one that is full-featured, or I can buy one that is cheap. Or I can buy services that fit somewhere in the middle.
Instead, I'm stuck with a poorly implemented, over-priced, under-performing tax burden that no one wants, yet everyone is forced to use because some politicians thought that they can't have any private competition. I think you'll see the brighter side of DIALUP after a few more years of Municipal Wi-Fi.
I said it years ago. Go look at Municipal Cable. Ask the locals in those areas how they like Muni CableTV, adn I bet you're lucky to leave the room without any serious scars. Municipal services suck. Government projects suck.
I've seen plenty of people truly expect to get 5-6 miles of people connected to one AP, and in many cities, the number of AP's is horrendous, but yet everyone expects an indoor network. One city block for indoor coverage is not going to happen, but an AP on every light pole just might.
Where I live, an AP on every 3 light poles would get the job done, connect everything with laptops, probably 90% indoors, but yet everyone groans it can't be done. It's just crazy that it's expected to wait 5 years on a tower thats 800 feet above sea level, then finally start deploying on the ground on city provided poles.
I never said the government wasn't to blame; I was simply disagreeing with the GGP saying that the government should never have been involved. I never said they did things well, but each municipality had different reasons for doing it poorly. You are right that, in the long view, government deficiencies of one sort or another can be considered the cause of failure, but I believe that is looking at things too glibly. Saying the government doesn't know enough about this and should just stay out and let the corporations do it ignores the fact that the government is us. We, those with the knowledge, should help the legislatures, etc. craft these laws, not point and laugh when they fail because they only get bad information from those with something to gain.
Clones are people two.
Yeah, but who holds the government responsible when it screws up? The people? Pfeh. The people are trapped in the cycle of replacing assholes from one side with assholes from the other.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
WiFi tech is moving forward much faster than municipalities move.
by the time they got 802.11 a/b rolled out, 802.11 a/b/g/n is out.
they were just too slow.
why should I pay for 11Mbit/s when I can get more than 100Mbit/s
They're using their grammar skills there.
Interestingly enough, I got my issue of Governing Magazine and they have an article about Wi-Fi. For those of you want to read another FA, click here.
There's also a couple of Q&A's with a couple of government type people and their viewpoints on municipal Wi-Fi.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
As far as difference between the cruel private master and the benevolent municipal master, I recommend the words of C.S. Lewis: "...Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Thank you for your civility. It was not required, but it is appreciated.
John Simson of SoundExchange, the "non-profit" set up to collect internet radio royalties. Didn't I just hear this guy's name somewhere? Oh yeah, he was just mentioning how "The time comes that we really have to [start collecting royalties from terrestrial radio]" on Slashdot yesterday. I guess he just figures we won't need to take money from all of the internet stations since they'll be able to grab more from the standard sources sooner or later.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Wi-fi VOIP
agreed. but is that the fault of the tool or the users?
Clones are people two.
Why does any city need wifi coverage? :P) then noone would be without a connection. It is pointless to cover an entire city with a service that most buildings provide for you.
The one question is: what device needs wide area, constant, mobile internet? Your phone?
Laptops are NOT mobile enough to warrant this sort of thing...oh so you want to use your laptop? Well your in a cafe right? Where else is do you think your gonna get a seat and a table? If your in a park with it then maybe your city council needs to put wifi there, not everywhere. If every cafe provided internet for its customers and other government operated places (libraries, parks, bus stops maybe?) provided low range wifi (or just ethernet cables on extendable reels
Even more stupid perhaps is to provide a service only usable by a specific and immature product. The laptop is not a real portable computer, it is too big, too prone to heat problems, too delicate and most of all too desk like to be truly portable.
Give it a few years. When laptops are the size of iPods it will be a problem, for now just worry where to get your latte while you surf.
-deadlock
There's a middle ground.
Which is why you need to do a trick that New Zealand does. You get private people running it BUT you have a public shareholder. For example, New Zealand post is a fully private company and runs efficiently. Its sole shareholder is the New Zealand Goverment, which takes a very hands-off let-it-do-its-thing approach.
Result is private sector efficiencies with public ownership and without the full 'make money at all cost' drive. The main thing is making sure the goverment doesn't meddle with it very often (i.e., sticks to broad objectives at an annual meeting).
Now, of course, NZ Post has no legally protected monopoloy on mail delivery, so competition can come along. It tries.. but NZ post simply covers so much and and is so efficient that it's difficult to compete. (Unlike the USA where the USPS has a protected monopoly).
I like the idea of municipal wireless. But I have one concern:
Municipal wi-fi has the potential to reduce the number of broadband subscribers. This may drive up the cost of getting broadband or put the providers out of business. At the same time, there will be pressure to censor the government-run system, since some people will be upset that "those pervs" are looking at pr0n with government resources.
So we end up with the government in a monopoly position, and required to censor, so getting uncensored network access may be impossible. And this is unacceptable.
Oh wait! There are no un-metered bandwidth mobile telecommunications companies in the UK.
My apartment isn't facing the street, so I don't get Google Wifi inside, though there's pod on the lamppost pretty nearby. I can't do everything I want to with the service, so I haven't bothered getting a repeater - it's still slower than my DSL, blocks port 25, doesn't give me a static IP address, and presumably won't let me run servers on it, plus I'd rather not give Google the opportunity to log all my traffic. (Plus I can see several 802.11 networks from various neighbors, so the couple of times I've had DSL problems I've been able to sponge off them; the tradeoff is that in my dining room I get a better signal from a neighbor's connection that kills my work VPN than I do from my own 802.11g, but at least I can browse the web and download email
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I live in London, where the City has recently acquired blanket coverage by one of the operators (actually The Cloud is more an association of WiFi operators with reasonable roaming agreements). My cellular provider is dropping its data rates next month, which will totally kill my use of "public" WiFi. Already it is a toss up - if I'm just checking email and looking at a few webpages, then the data based charging from my cellular provider is going to work out cheaper - even at the current outrageous rate. If I am going to download something more substantial, then the WiFi's time based charging is better, and I might notice the improvement in download speed over HSDPA in that case. The phone of course has the advantage of continuing to work after the train leaves the station, sitting on a train being the only time I ever use public internet anyway.
He is right on the money.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
- millions of dollars were spent
- some people are worried about longterm sustainability but things haven't been around long enough to draw any conclusions
- random Mary Joe Citizen (someone who sells software out of their house and a student) doesn't like it
You can't draw any conclusions from that. And considering this is coming out of what appears to be an industry think tank, we might as well have an opposing view of municipal broadband: From The Institute for Local Self Reliance's Localizing the Internet: Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem": In short: And this paper has better case studies than pulling random people off the street.It's purely a matter of the market. Suppliers got into municipal wi-fi because they had dollar signs in their eyes, which led them to under-serve and over-charge. Toronto's municipal wi-fi costs $30 CAD a month. And while it's quite fast, it only works outdoors (which in Canada means it's only going to be used a few months of the years anyway) and it only has a relatively small geographic footprint. So that $30 is ON TOP OF the price a Toronto user is already paying for Internet and e-mail by cable or DSL. Until free (or at least ad-sponsored) wi-fi becomes ubiquitous, it's better value for anyone in Toronto to walk a block to the nearest coffee shop and nurse a $2 coffee while using their access point.
I use an ethernet cable. Its faster , cheaper , more reliable and impossible to hack from over the air.
Carrboro, North Carolina has public WiFi downtown. It's a fairly small area, less than 1 sq. mi. I'm guessing. The service is "adequate", not super fast for media surfing, but for basic email, non-critical web surfing it has worked fine for me the few times I have tried it.
;-)
They have a few things going for them. First, Carrboro is a smallish town, so the bandwidth load isn't too high. Second, a lot of local cafes offer their own (usually free) WiFi, so that reduces the load even more.
Any other locals out there with more concrete data than my lame ass non-analysis?
And no, don't even think of moving here. We're all full! Go away!
http://www.bitworksmusic.com/
BitWorksMusic.com -- odd tunes for odd times
1. It's a Fox News report. They have zero credibility.
2. Just look at the list of related stories. Not a single positive one, and there's even stuff like Wifi laptops endangering children.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Gartner, but like their research papers.
The wireless mesh tech is now falling into the through of disallusionment of the hype cycle, after inflated expectations.
Maybe it'll end up being practical when it helps the city to read electricity and water meters?