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Why Municipal Wi-Fi Networks have Been Such a Flop
Jake Melville from Slate shot us a link to one of their stories that outlines why municipal wi-fi failed but also tells of the too-rare success stories. While cities that left their wi-fi in the hands of the private sector fell prey to the "last-mile" problem, grassroots efforts such as that in St. Cloud, FL, have blossomed.
It's a selling problem.
As a politician, you can't 'sell' citywide internet access as easily as you can public transport, sewer system or power. It's not one of those "must have" things, it's one of those "why should I have to pay for it" things.
It's easy to get other municipal expenses explained. Citywide public transport? Ok, you may have a car so you might not need it, but if everyone did, you'd be in jams longer. Gas? Duh. Power? Duh! Sewer system? DUH!
Internet? Huh? Interhet? Hell what do I need that for, eh? If someone wanna use it, they gotta pay it, 'k, not on my tax money!
Should we reach the point where internet access becomes so much a part of everyday life as tapwater and power in your apartment, we can talk about it. Before that, no politician would survive it, politically, to suggest blowing tax money into internet.
It could work akin to public transport, where you pay a (nominal) monthly fee, but then, in how many cities could that work? I mean, it would certainly work around here, where you still pay 50+ for 1024/256, but how about areas where companies already offer 4mbit+ for less than 30?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think the size of the cities also has an effect. For example here in Oulu, Finland, the panoulu network works extremely well and covers most of the city center and all of the university. On the other hand there are only around 125000 citizens. But maybe something to take a look at, many of the people behind panoulu are constantly zooming around the world at various conferences.
Is coming along with nary a hitch, as far as I can tell. They started late last year, have a good chunk of the city up and running under it already, and should be done with the whole project by the end of the year. I don't have any real-world experience with it (I live in St. Paul), but I haven't heard anything but good about it, so far.
Seriously, the city is making setting up wifi look about as difficult as slapping together legos; I can't figure out how these other cities have managed to screw it up so badly.
And the St. Paul city government just voted to go with a fiber optic rollout for their municipal broadband. Of course, no word on where the $200+ million is going to come from to pay for it, so it's really just vaporware at the moment.
But God knows there's enough fiber laid down out there up to the curb. It's been almost ten years since they buried those suckers; might as well light plug 'em in and see how well they light up.
My WAP is invisible from downstairs.
Um... get a WiFi Repeater?
My access point is in an upstairs bedrom. If I want direct line of sight from my shed, no signal, an old brick washhouse is in the way. So I got a thirty-quid repeater (actually just a regular access point switched into "repeater" mode) and installed that on the corner of the washhouse (in view of both the bedroom AND the shed). Now 100% signal in the shed.
There really isn't any magic to installing a WiFi repeater. Plug in to your PC, configure over a web browser with the SSID and encryption key, disconnect from your PC, plonk it somewhere where it can see both you and an original access point. Job done.
If I can figure this out in my 100-year-old farmworkers' cottage in rural England, I'm sure as hell you can figure it out in a modern US city gated community. It really, really isn't hard.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
the only reason municipal wifi fails is that there are too many companies desperate to get rich from providing internet access, and not at all keen on the concept of access for all unless the aforementioned 'all' pay many doller.
In the pacific there have been free wireless access rollouts that are problem free. I mean shit, if an Island can manage it, so can a city ffs.
My suspicion is that the march of technology is hampered by the greed of individuals.
At first blush it sounds like a really great idea. Get a couple DSL lines, hook them to AP's, turn off all the security so everybody can access it and your golden.
However, once people realize the current limitations of AP's and how much infrastructure behind the whole thing that needs to be put into place and how much it's going to cost to put that infrastructure in place, they run screaming from the project.
Here's what a town should do...
1. Don't try to put wifi everywhere, instead focus on places like downtown. Realize that your going to have to put *some* infrastructure in, but encourage businesses to install AP's through tax incentives. Come to understand that places that you going to have to put wifi is going to be expensive because the cost of the gear (outdoor AP's are expensive)
2. For everywhere else, subsidize it. Hire someone who knows what their doing and come up with an equipment list that a household would need to become part of the wifi network. (my thinking is that it would be a specific router with a specific config). Then send mail to your local citizens offering a tax credit to anybody who installs an access point. Heck you could even purchase them in some ridiculous quanitity that you could resell to make a profit.
Note, the only thing I haven't addressed in this scenario is technical support and the fact that many telecom companies have issues with them using their service to give service to others. Though I suppose as long as your not making a profit, they really can't say much.
Just my idea.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Infrastructure that works well, cannot be duild by private companies. It requires an investor that has very long-term goals. That would, in this case, be the city. It will still be there in decades and it cannot just vanish into bankrupcy because of faulty planning. So it has a real interest in getting it right. Of course it cost money. Of course it takes time. But this is one arena where the great "private investors will do it" myth of the US fails, and badly.
Why do you think there are no collapsing bridges or ditches in Europe? Not because people there are smarter, but because the idea of planning for decades ahead has been learned by countless desasters in the past. The US settlers could have taken that lesson with them. Instead my impression is that infrastrucure is build on a level that suggests people do not really plan to stay long in one place.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I live in St. Cloud, FL. City managers tell us that our taxes are essentially $300/year lower because they provide Internet access (estimated that we would normally pay $25/month to an ISP).
However, I only know of one person who can actually get the service in his home. The WAPs are too spread out to get coverage unless you are outside. Or unless your are downtown, they have them concentrated there.
I cannot get the WiFi from my home, so I still have to pay for my own Internet access.
So, not only am I not saving those $300, I am actually spending an additional $300.
If a city is going to charge everyone in the city for a service, they better provide it to everyone in that city. Kinda like garbage service... I don't see anyone in the city not getting their garbage picked up.
I was cool with it when they only provided it downtown (the pilot program). It was sort of an economic boost for the businesses there, but it was a waste of money to deploy it for the entire city.
"If God had intended us to walk he would not have invented roller skates." -- Willy Wonka
Would you give up your current home or work connection completely and use the muni WiFi for all your needs? Banking, paying bills, etc. Knowing the security issues of WIFi? I don't think I would.
So if I'm going to pay for a personal access anyway, tell me why should I be thrilled at paying into the cities 'free' WiFi scheme?
This article makes a simplistic argument but leaves out one other key reason: lawsuits. The big communication companies didn't just have an infrastructure in place for providing bandwidth, they had a litany of lawyers that often descended upon the municipality to attempt block them from providing these services.
I work for a municipality and frankly, municipal wifi is #102,448 on our list of priorities. Why? It's SUPER expensive with very little benefit. My city has a population of almost 200,000. To cover a city of our size we'd literally need hundreds of access points @ a cost of millions of dollars. We are a technical staff of only about 10. Can you imagine 10 people being tasked with trying to maintain hundreds of access points? When you've got hundreds of anything electronic out in the field, a certain percentage is always going to be broken. So you've got this project that needs constant maintenance that's extremely expensive and resource intensive. If we're reaaaally lucky we may get 200 people using it on a regular basis. We're talking about a project of millions to benefit 200 people that probably already have internet access anyway.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather spend those millions to benefit a school and get educational software into Florida's failing schools. Or hell, open an entire new school so kids don't have to wake up an hour earlier to be bussed half way across the city. There are just so many way this money could be used better. That's why municipal wifi doesn't take off.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Muni WiFi shoud fail for the sake of free speech. It's always boggled my mind to see the amount of support on /. for muni WiFi. With the general (and healthy) distrust of government in this forum, why should we desire to ask a government to own and operate a primary channel of the public's communication? Do you really want mayors and governors loyal to the Bush administration to have significant say in who has access to look inside your internet connection?
As a San Francisco resident and Earthlink subscriber, I'm delighted the Wifi proposal flopped. First, as an Earthlink subscriber I knew they wouldn't deliver. Second, it was just another of these public/private partnerships that have been all the rage for the past 30 years or so, and which almost invariable promise the moon and the stars on a shoestring budget and then vanishes from everyone's consciousness. Building a public wifi network is really not that ambitious an undertaking. The Earthlink proposal was to cost how much? $20 million? That's a pittance for the city of San Francisco, which has an annual budget of more than a billion dollars. And that's to build the network, not for annual maintenance, which presumably would cost much less. It was absolutely pitiful that Gavin Newsom gave away such an important piece of infrastructure to a private company for such a puny sum. And it's because he's the sort of New Democrat that emerged in the '90s, beholden to corporate interests and afraid to be associated with anything that might smack of the Old Democrats--ie, the New Deal and the Great Society Democrats. Well, I wish he'd lose that fear. The New Deal produced the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. At the height of the Great Depression. Not bad, hm? If we'd had New Democrats running things back then, we'd probably all still be paying dearly to commute on private ferry services, because God forbid government try to do anything to make peoples' lives better when there is potential for private companies to make a profit.
Municipal wifi is so cheap that there really is no reason we couldn't do that *and* build a fiber-optic network; I mean, it's an order of magnitude cheaper so why not do both. Fast networks are already crucial infrastructure, and will be even more so, particularly in a city that considers itself a capital of high tech. Private industry isn't going to get it done. So just step up and *lead* already. I can't believe I live in a rich, densely populated, supposed high-tech capital and the best broadband I can get for less than $100 a month is this shitty 1.5Mbps/384Kbps DSL!
802.11 networks were never designed for large area deployments. Wi-Fi was designed to be used in short range applications - a nice convenience that augments the functionality of a wired LAN.
I've done a few medium-size wireless deployments and the core problem with 802.11 is that you need to drag a wire to each access-point....and in a city, you need a lot of access-points. Management of these huge networks is a solvable problem (Meru and Cisco have done a pretty good job with that).
Sure there are mesh-network technologies like Ricochet (remember them?), and WiMax is around the corner - these technologies are actually designed to cover very large areas to minimize the amount of access-points and cable runs. These technologies might be more promising.
In the end, municipalities need to fork over the cash, and implement the correct technology to make this succeed. Without cash and good decisions, these wi-fi projects are doomed.
-ted
I can say that both technically and politically St. Cloud went about it the right way. The government did not sell it as an access for everyone network. They sold it as a business sector network that would encourage businesses to look at St. Cloud as a home base. For those of you not familiar with Central Florida there are a lot of outlying cities around Orlando like St. Cloud, each of these cities are trying to become the next small business sector in much the way that Winter Park did. St. Cloud positioned its network as a system to reduce the costs of opening a business in the Central Florida area and by doing so planed on the increased revenue from new businesses to offset the cost of the network. In turn this gave access to the citizens without them having to bear the brunt of the cost. The strategy was a political risk but it seems to have paid off. The network had its problems in the beginning but I currently use it daily without outages. So much so that last year I moved my phone off of a traditional line and onto SunRocket (that's another story). My call quality was excellent and I paid $200 a year for phone and nothing for internet access which used to be $70 a month for both. I believe we are now at a 77% adoption rate which I believe speaks to the opinion of the system. In all though I believe that it is all in how you position the implementation and how you sell it to the people. St. Cloud had a good strategy which paid off. It was a gamble for them but it worked out in the end.
Some neighbors and I started a wireless coop about 5-6 years ago in the mountains west of Boulder CO (http://www.mric.coop). We have about 500 subscribers at $50/month and cover an area of several hundred square miles. While there are some commercial WISPs in the area, it is difficult to see how they have a viable business plan. We have a very limited number of paid employees and most of the work is done by volunteers. The mountainous terrain with lots of trees makes it impossible to have 100% coverage. Additionally, we are finding out that 802.11b, while a good way to get started, relatively cheaply, has severe limitations, causing poor performance for a number of subscribers. We are considering changing at least part of our infrastructure to Motorola Canopy gear. In order to get coverage, we have several T-1 lines at different locations interconnected to each other and other APs by a wireless backhaul. Of course the problem with 802.11b is that while there are 11 channels (in the US) to use, only 3 are non-overlapping. Even using vertical and horizontal polarities for distribution, interference is still a big problem. So far we have been able to work out cooperation agreements with the commercial wisps so that we don't interfere with each other, since such activity would have nasty consequences for everyone. We were able to pay off our initial investment of $30-40K, in about 3 years and are debt free with a positive cash flow.
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