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San Francisco Free Wi-Fi Plan Fails
Reader r writes with news from San Francisco that Earthlink has backed out of contract negotiations to blanket the city with free Wi-Fi, citing money problems. Seems like only yesterday that Chicago's Wi-Fi deal fell apart for much the same reason. Quoting: "The contract, which was three years in the making, had run into snags with the Board of Supervisors, but ultimately it was undone when Atlanta-based EarthLink announced Tuesday that it no longer believed providing citywide Wi-Fi was economically viable for the company... EarthLink spokesman Jerry Grasso said that EarthLink was willing to work with San Francisco but had decided that it 'was not willing to work in the business model where EarthLink fronts all the money to build, own and operate the network.'"
Really, why are authorities even promising monopoly wifi to companies anyway?
Deleted
Because it was?
Ok, so it was reported yesterday, but it happened close enough to be reasonable called "yesterday".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Looks like they were planning on making the money back by charging them $20 for a faster connection, and other cities they've done this in haven't seen enough people signing up for faster internet. It sounds like they've been burned in other cities and had the ability to pull out of this one, so they did.
I wonder if this will affect Philadelphia also. We've been receiving advertisements in the mail announcing Earthlink as Philly's citywide wi-fi provider, but with Chicago and San Fran now stopped, and San Fran not seen as profitable, I find it hard to imagine that the Philadelphia city area will be as viable.
I've been to two Socialist countries, two Communist countries and three Free Republic/Deomcratic countries.
I kiss the soil of the U.S. every time I return.
I've see Communism first hand. Being told "sorry, you don't have water on Tuesdays and Thursdays" is unplesant. Yes, I understand there is a failiure in the infrastructure but it isn't corrected without incentive. People, sadly, acclimate to piss-poor surroundings. One or two generations of that and getting out is difficult.
What does this have to do with Wireless? A lot.
I thought about designing my own 'free' wireless network. The manpower and cost to keep it up and running is obscene. Even with free hardware and ISP service, the cost of making sure it's running 100% is a full time job, if not two.
Without a financial incentive, there is little to be gained. The leaches of society would tear down the system.
While Capitalism has it's flaws, humanity isn't willing to share and play nice. Yet.
It's only free until you get your pay stub.
Its just been re-organised, now its
San Fransisco- Wi-fi free
The city of Minneapolis, MN is going wireless and in some areas is already providing service. The estimated completion date is December 2007. The charge is pretty reasonable too, only $20 or $30 per month depending on access speed.
i s/
More info here: http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/wirelessminneapol
Many squad cars and firetrucks are already using the wireless technology and a number of cameras are used for survelence in high-crime areas. Since I drive through one of these areas every day, I can tell you the cameras have already made a real difference!
There is hope that with this kind of access, that the city will become a more livable place and that some lower income people will be able to use these services to better themseleves. While I hope that this is true, I'll also take it with a grain of salt and say that I will believe it when I see it.
This service was used for several days after the bridge disaster with very good results. Talk about trial by fire!
Here in Portland, OR MetroFi and the city collaborated to provide a similar service. They haven't quite gotten all of the city done, but the core is covered (and is damned spiffy). Perhaps this opens the door for MetroFi, some other service, or maybe google alone to pick up the ball
What do you know I wrote a novel
Philadelphia now has Earthlink Wireless throughout large portions of the city. All of the downtown is covered (about 20 square miles). The rest of the city coming soon. There has been some role out problems and speed issues but starting at 6$ a month for a citywide service, I expect to see a lot more notebooks in the park once they get the kinks worked out. I'll be signing up as soon as my existing contract is up.
Well that and the government gets something out of the deal. They aren't just rolling over to some corporate entity. In exchange for offering up city infastructure, they get guaranteed access to the wireless network. That is worth something.
What do you know I wrote a novel
Now Meraki is doing it, a company backed in by Google.
Read more about it, A Free Mesh Network for San Francisco
Earthlink badly overreached themselves here with two major mistakes - first, deciding to use Tropos equipment to paint an entire city. Most of the money you burn in setting up a wifi installation is in the install and then trying to get everything to work when your planning tools are out of sync with reality (which is almost always). Tropos's mesh equipment is crap, so they've wasted months and burned untold money trying to nail jello to a wall.
Second, trying to blanket an entire city at once is doable, but it's far more practical to grow the network from little seed areas (while keeping future growth in mind) - blanket a six block area of downtown, for instance, and then expand from that. This lets you get everything right for a small area before you apply that to larger areas - it's the way almost all WISP (wireless ISPs) operate and it works fairly well.
I think Earthlink finally realized it wasn't gonna work, which of course makes all the assumptions under which they signed contracts not so great for them.
Remind me again what the business plan is for free municipal wifi ?
Oh right, there is none.
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
Last year Earthlink rolled out wi-fi in the city of Anaheim with much (well, a bit of) local fanfare. I was leasing a small office for myself for part-time use in Anaheim and it sounded like a pretty good deal, esp. compared to what AT&T was offering for a small business package (which was basically the poorest home broadband package at 3x the price.)
I signed up on the year-contract to get the best rate. Service was very spotty. Aggravating at times, but generally ok for my purposes since I was using my access now and then to check email and to research any questions that came up in the course of my work. Most my work was being done offline.
What really turned me off the service is that Earthlink offered no email support -- you had to call their support line (off-shored) and wait on hold for an indeterminate amount of time to get simple questions answered. Also, I was never able to pick up a signal from my laptop's wireless card. I needed to be cabled into their ugly little wireless modem. Even from the Starbucks at the epicenter of the coverage area (across the street from City Hall), I couldn't get a signal on my wireless card directly.
I had a suspicion that the service was going to be a colossal failure. I canceled just last week as soon as my year was up. Hadn't even used it the last three months I paid for it. Interesting now to see these agreements crumbling left and right. I get the impression that it's much harder to deploy reliable city-wide wireless service than it looks on paper. (I saw crews installing the little wireless transponders on lampposts across the city -- how much has to be put in maintaining these things? Bird shit a factor?)
And with the limited initial rollout area, I always wondered how economically viable it was going to be. It was supposed to be citywide by around this time, but even then I question how many people are going to sign up for this. Finally, I suspect it's much less viable for the high-demand media-rich content people are now coming to expect online.
It's too bad because the failure of wi-fi just reinforces the cable/telecom strangehold over broadband service. Is wi-fi actually succeeding anywhere?
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5094200. html
One astute commentator wrote:
A better idea might be to sell repeaters (and bandwidth) to businesses at a discount rate, so that they can give their customers free public wi-fi. If the City of Houston chipped in for a few of its parks and libraries, we'd be basically complete, since there are almost no public spaces in America that aren't businesses or government institutions.
technical writing / development
It sounds like Wi-Max will be available soon, and will be able to provide wide-area coverage without requiring nearly as many base stations. Perhaps this is one reason why companies are suddenly deciding that big Wi-fi projects are a bad idea... because after investing $$$$ on thousands of Wi-fi stations, the competition will next year be able to take their customers away by installing just a few dozen Wi-max stations?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Our plans for municipal wifi through AT&T just fell through, too. All of these muni-wifi plans biting the dust at just about the same time seems a little suspicious.
The best place I've found to get details on news like this is the blog "Wi-Fi Networking News", by Glenn Fleishmann. http://wifinetnews.com./
The blame is entirely upon the Board of Supervisors. SF Mayor Newsom pushed the plan for years as both a way to bring WiFi to the City, and an option for free Internet access to poor residents. The BoS responded by holding things up repeatedly to tack on political BS to take credit for the mayor's plan.
Most recently, the board decided to cut Earthlink's contract in half and demand twice the bandwidth, as if they could "fix" things by jacking up numbers. These assholes do this to every project in the City, hoping to load everything up with bulletpoints that they can parade as accomplishments. What it almost always means in reality, however, is that projects never get completed or are delayed for so long that the economic benefit of their add ons is a large negative.
This also happens in housing projects, where developers come in with a plan to build new housing, and the BoS insist that increasingly high percentages of units are reserved for welfare housing called "affordable housing"--not for the poor, but a for handful of well connected people who want to live on someone else's dime. So 10-20% of a project is subsidized, jacking up housing costs and ensuring that the only people who can afford to live in the new housing are the ultra-rich. Meanwhile, all the housing construction is held up in welfare negotiations until projects are tabled or until they are held up for so long that the minor addition of more welfare units constitute an insignificant trickle of new "affordable housing." This is backed up both by those who think market pricing can be overridden by political pricing, and by those who want to keep the supply low so that the demand and prices will remain sky high.
The plot to kill SF's WiFi was the same coalition of populists who thought a community group could put together a faster system, and those who didn't want competition to their pay WiFi or internet services.
http://roughlydrafted.com/
My biggest fear about having these monopolies is that the SCOTUS will rule that you have little to no expectation of privacy from government surveillance if you are using the local muni wifi
... Miranda should not be preserved simply because it occupies a special place in the public consciousness. There is little harm in admitting that we made a mistake in taking away from people their ability to decide for themselves. By overturning Miranda, we reaffirm for the people the wonderful reality that they govern themselves, as stated in the Tenth Amendment".
No, you actually have more privacy if government operates it. Government is subject to various ammendments, but individuals or corporations are not. Also, there are various privacy acts that apply to government but not individuals or corporations.
The best one that comes to mind was Scalia's lowering of requirements on police to read rights because of the "new professionalism among police." He based a ruling on how he feels about the current state of police professionalism.
Scalia lowered nothing. He wrote the dissenting opinion. The court had upheld Miranda.
His argument was not based upon police professionalism: "The Court did not just apply the Constitution when it handed down Miranda, it expanded the Constitution, imposing an immense and antidemocratic prophylactic rule upon Congress and the states. It was an example of raw, judicial power that simply asserted a constitutional right
Note that by "governing themselves" he does not mean governing themselves well: "Preventing foolish people from incriminating themselves is the only purpose of Miranda, and that is a far cry from what the Fifth Amendment requires in terms of protecting someone from being compelled to incriminate themself. Nor is a lawyer required because the interrogators can do the same as any lawyer can -- tell the suspect they have a right to be silent. The Constitution is not offended by a criminal's commendable qualm of conscience or fortunate fit of stupidity."