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Municipal Wi-Fi - A Promise Unfulfilled?
An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Merron at InformationWeek writes about the problems with municipal Wi-Fi, and how despite the high hopes of cities across the country there hasn't been much success deploying it in reality. He also examines the few successful applications of the technology, and tries to explore why more projects don't make it out of their infancy. 'Thus far, there have been a few true municipal Wi-Fi success stories and several spectacular failures. But more than half of municipal Wi-Fi networks remain only in the planning stages. The broad consensus among analysts and providers is that the only viable business models will be centered around municipal government applications, which appear to be able to provide cities with the ability to provide both better and more cost-efficient services for residents and increase city revenue. This will ensure that providers like EarthLink can recoup their capital costs within a few years.'"
"Oh shit, this costs a lot of money and we really don't get anything out of it. PROJECT CANCELED."
Any non-small wireless rollout that myself or my friends have done is generally doomed.
The box says 50Mbps, but when you have ten clients, it seems like 56kbps unless you are five feet from the access-point. 50Mbps is fine, but then there is all sorts of encapsulation overhead and random "beaconing" that brings that down to, like, 5Mbps... then you and the ten clients get to share THAT. basically, 802.11 sucks any way you cut it when you have more than two or three people using it.
802.11 was designed for indoor use. Read the spec. It talks about indoor propagation and describes a coordination function that works well with that model.
802.11 doesn't scale well to large footprint cells or high density deployments with lots of APs and clients. It excels indoors allowing a small number of people to attached wirelessly to a wired network.
The backhaul services are not standardized in 802.11 and so are generally neither interoperable not secure (E.G. UAM at airports).
Compare with 802.16. It is designed for outdoor base stations, large footprints, indoor, outdoor or mobile clients and has a backhaul architecture and protocol set defined by the WiMAX forum.
802.11 Municipal WiFi is a round technology crowbarred into a square application.
Evil people are out to get you.
http://www.fred-ezone.com/
Fredericton has had Wi-Fi rolled out for a couple years now. The status is degraded because we just got hit by tropical storm Noel.
Until towns/cities can do this at a reasonable cost, and until providers can actually make a buck off it, I wouldn't expect to see widespread success at public Wi-Fi projects.
What's going to happen to all the well-digging companies? After all, just like with a wireless base station, one pipe can be shared by at least a dozen users.
I don't know about any other cities, but in Portland Oregon the municipal wifi was billed as ,wonderful system that would provide everyone with free broadband. Well if you can log in to the system, you find all sorts or limitations- and something else- that there is a parallel pay Wifi system run by the same company. Gee, wonder how that happened? I never heard any public discussion on the matter. And I wonder how much Portland paid for this sweet deal?
Here's a new alternative to the typical commercial city wifi deployment, that just started up in the past few months:
http://sonic.net/wifi/
In short, you dedicate a fixed amount of your bandwidth as a free wifi spot. There's talk about you eventually making some money off it, but currently that's not offered as it's too new.
Disclaimer: I am a very happy sonic.net customer. I have no affiliation with them other than that. However, I have signed up for this, and will be trying it out.
http://www.fon.com/en/
Deleted
Putting your faith in the government is crazy. They will not be efficient it is not because of any particular person but a good government should be inefficient. To Deploy a Municipal Wi-Fi Especially in America will require Efficiency not politics. Access is needed to given the most good for the most people. Not what will normally happen give the most good to the right people. Government measures failure so it is not what you do right will promote you it is what you do wrong that gets you in trouble. The same with Wi-Fi if they did make it work and work well little success, it it fails then they are in big trouble. Even if you outsource to companies to do the work efficiency they will work to increasing their pay not the greater good, so the same thing happends. Contractors take the blame for poor management by the government (They know they that is why they are still in business after they do these "huge" screwup because they know they were doing what they were ordered to do, and most of the time it is on the record that they opposed the view)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My fair city recently fell for this kind of scam. 802.11x is basically the absolute worst wireless spec to try and deploy over any area larger than a medium-sized house. Massive interference; everything from cordless phones to microwave ovens. Leaves destroy 90% of the signal. Leaves with fresh rain on them completely destroy even multipath.
Our city tried so that it could attract high-tech workers. They were gunning for a "revolutionary" wireless deployment using IP6 so they could do multicast groups with video. Over WiFi backhaul. F'ing brilliant. Even though Harrisonburg has some truly epic fails, in *this* case they did okay. They gave permission for a private company to do it, but refused to actually *pay* for them to do it. Naturally, the company failed.
The system was originally pitched as an offshoot of the electric company's fiber ring. The municipal wireless wasn't supposed to be about ubiquitous laptop and PDA internet. They were going to use Better Stuff (Motorola Canopy, or Navini, maybe) to create a city utility network. ISPs could sign up to provide internet and pay the city a fee per customer that signs up. In that way, fixed broadband last-mile backhauls *actually make sense*, though perhaps not financially.
Somehow, though, it turned into a "WiFi Cloud".
This is mostly due to one technology "adviser" from the local university that is a *complete* moron. I'm not sure how much money he makes off of recommending worthless technology ideas, but we'll just say that "Harrisonburg IP6 Wireless Network" was not his dumbest idea by a long shot.
As my sainted grandmother would say, "Bad cess to them!"
668: Neighbour of the Beast
http://www.albanyny.org/newsarticles/07-05-22/downtown_albany_is_going_wireless_for_free.aspx I live outside of Albany, NY where, apparently, there is a WiFi freenet available in parts of the city. I have an iPhone (without EDGE enabled) so I've tried to access it with no luck. I have a friend that lives next-door to Washington park (where the city usually has its big events) and he tells me that he can pick up the free'net sometimes on his patio. bah, i've got nothing more to add, municipal WiFi still seems like vaporware.
My Sig Sucks
So how does anyone think they can manage to cover a larger area. In many airports it is expensive, and thus useless to me.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
haven't heard a thing about it in the news anywhere, but all these access points are coming up 'city of minneapolis' and 'minneapolis wifi' and such, they have great signal strength but are flaky as hell (network/router errors and such, not wifi connection problems) - my guess is they're testing. ...every few blocks or so, on a telephone pole there's these coffee can looking things that have 2 antennas, they've been putting them up over the last few months... I figured they were shot spotters but now with the APs on I'm guessing thats the wifi. haven't heard it on the evening news or in the strib.
its way faster than the neighbor's connections i've been using
promise fulfilled here, so far anyways
The question we need to ask is if broadband access is required utility that is needed by everyone for economic development but isn't cost effective for private business. Should it be supplemented like roads, buses, trains and run by the government? Should it be a regulated monopoly like gas, water and electric? Non-profit co-op like some other utilities? Heavily regulated private business like airlines and railroads? Or remain what it is now.. unregulated and private?
Municipal Water isn't free.
Municipal Energy isn't free.
Municipal Waste Disposal isn't free.
Municipal Newtwork Service... where did anyone get the idea it should be free?
It is without children?
(Il est sans fille)?
Where do these tags come from?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Although we'll agree that politicians are in the bag of telcos, there are real and factual difficulties with muni-WiFi
1) bad cellular support grid (3 non-interfering channels, making coverage very difficult)
2) competition with other wireless, paid services (UMTS, EVDO, etc)
3) competition from commercial 'hotspot' providers (hotels, paid-hotspots, etc.)
4) poor business models that caved Google, Earthlink, and others
5) the silliness of using a LAN technology (look at the specs as mentioned up-thread) for a MAN/WAN purpose, as the CSMA/CA technology plainly sucks for services that require mulitple concurrent low-latency streams from a single AP)
6) non-existent subnet handoff (all solutions are proprietary, so far), and lack of VLAN wizardry
7) super-dumb security-- as in NONE as there are no encryption schemes, poor to no authentication (too expensive) and no session controls
Plainly, muni-Wifi is a great idea, if WiFi itself worked, and if there were business models to sustain its deployment. It's a misapplication of the technology, politicians aside. We're just not there yet in terms of building meshes that provide excellent or in many cases, just minimally usable coverage.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It's unfortunate that the author didn't mention the municipal wifi network that is being built in Minneapolis. So far service seems to be pretty good, and it helped rescue efforts when the 35w bridge collapsed here:
http://blog.tmcnet.com/wireless-mobility/wifi-network-helped-minneapolis-deal-with-bridge-collapse.asp
Wireless Minneapolis is rolling out nicely. It is succeeding because
- It is not free -- but half the price of other ISP providers in the area so it is a great bargain.
- It is a based on a Municipal Services model, where the city will be the biggest customer of the network. So even if no one signs up, the network provider will still make a profit.
I expect future muni wifis will use a Municipal Services-based model as well.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
Very similar to this story http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/28/0555258/ but like it neglects to mention that big comm companies hold up a lot of the progress with litigation threats. This article does make a good case for cost for big cities. Most large cities probably have a customer base already getting broadband, true. But what about Podunk USA that has little choice? Why hold the threat of a lawsuit over them when they have no choices?
Large-scale WiFi works best when it's supported by taxes or mandatory fees, like on college campuses, when there are no other inexpensive options, such as an airport that lacks convenient Ethernet ports, or when you plan on losing money.
Since no city or private enterprise wants to roll out WiFi as a money-loser, and since most residential areas are within reach of cheap cable or DSL connections, that leaves us with captive-audience situations.
WiFi as a money-loser, paid for out of general tax revenue, makes sense in public parks, public libraries, and maybe even low-income housing complexes.
Public WiFi as a break-even or moneymaker makes sense in municipally owned sports stadiums, convention centers, airports, and other places where people who are already shelling out the big bucks hang out. In places like that, companies will be happy to enter into joint ventures or even pay a concession fee for an exclusive deal with the city.
City-wide WiFI on the public dime doesn't make much sense unless you can get the low-volume areas with little or no incremental costs above providing for the high-volume/high-profit areas. With WiFi, this just isn't the case. It might be with WiMax or some similar "one base station covers as much area as a cell tower" technology.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
this will happen via the backdoor. already consumers are getting FON-enabled routers and sharing their connections with other FON members. look at the map they provide for coverage in say London http://maps.fon.com/
we don't need no government input; this will happen, very cheaply, and very soon.
I think a great solution would be to push user participating into free wifi. Here is how I can imagine it going down.
A company could push a solution where a wireless network can be subsidized by ad revenue for portal pages that are invoked every n pages with ads from local businesses/internet companies etc. These guys would basically pay for all to grab the eyes of those who connect to the a wifi spot. This way you have a revenue stream. But what would make this different from a typical hotspot is deploying it on home broadband connections. You set up a sign up program for households to dedicate a certain amount of their bandwidth to wireless providers and you pay them for bandwidth used or by number of people connected. You basically compensate the home user who signed up in exchange for their connection. The home user dedicating their bandwidth would have a router installed that is on another network from the home user's lan to add some security for the home user that random strangers won't try to hijack their network. With enough user participation you can create a small economic eco system between the advertisers and the bandwidth providers while taking a substantial amount of revenue for being the middle man in this.
Doing this, we don't need one giant access point with 400,000 repeaters degrading the signal down to zero but a mesh of networks that users can access from one spot to another. This would work really well in residential neighborhoods where a couple of residents can get free wifi off a neighbor without having to find an open linksys router and businesses could do this and get a some revenue for their services without having to rape patrons for cash like tmobile hotspots do.
Maybe if people tried learning from successes rather than failures there would be more organizations that would get this right.
And once again, one of the most successful municipal wifi projects in the midwest goes largely unnoticed. Service covers thousands of people in residential neighborhoods and commercial areas. Speed is just about as fast as a cable modem. And I can take my laptop anywhere there is coverage, authenticate, and have Internet access. Faster than SBC DSL, and I don't have to pay the evil local cable company.
The real problem with [free] municipal wi-fi is that everyone, slashgeeks especially, seem to have decided that it is the Next Big Thing.
Utterly without evidence that is a) desireable, let alone b) possible.
While, it may not be ever present, municipal wi-fi is great when you can find it. The last time I took a trip, it occured to me that the hospitality industry has some money to lose as well, though. I went to St. Louis a few weeks ago and was rather annoyed that my expensive 4-star hotel room didn't include free internet access. Sure, the website advertised internet access, but you had to pay $9.99/night for it. When I travel, don't usually stay in expensive hotels and, believe it or not, the internet access issue is partly why. I tend to stay in places such as Comfort Inns which typically offer free Wi-Fi. I can forgo the benefits of a valet service or concierge service if it means free Wi-Fi. Besides, the walk from the parking lot will provide me with some much needed exercise.
Getting around to my point, though... In April of last year I met up with some old college friends in New Orleans. We decided to stay at the W Hotel downtown because, well, it looked really nice and we'd always wanted to stay there when we all actually used to live in New Orleans. We are also all computer nerds and had our laptops out within minutes, but the problem was that none of us really wanted to pay the W's exhorbitant internet extortion fees. That's when we remember that the city had set up a free Wi-Fi network as part of the rebuilding process after Katrina. Lo and behold, we were all geeking out and checking our emails within minutes.
Which brings me back to my last trip. I seriously considered paying the $9.99 fee for a bit. After all, it was considerably less than my bar tab that night, and do I really value alcohol that much more than internet anyway? Apparently, yes. But when I thought about it, the hospitality industry really does stand to lose revenue relatively quickly if they could no longer charge for internet access. The costs of maintaining a wireless network in a hotel are probably negligible and for most hotels I'm sure the initial equipment costs have been more than covered in wi-fi fees. That means that each $10/night/room fee is pure profit. In the case of my trip to St. Louis, that would have been an extra $20 profit from me. In the case of the W in New Orleans, we had two non-adjoining rooms and so it would have been $40 profit for them during our stay. That's not exactly chump change and I'm sure it's a revenue stream that the hotels would definitely not want to lose out on. Heck, $40 is what many households pay for their monthly DSL service.
So anyway, there it is. Some perspective on yet another (possibly overlooked) player not wishing to lose money from the establishment of free wi-fi networks.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Muni WiFi is a failure for technical reasons. WiFi technology was design for LANs, not blanketing a city. Only a moron like a govt. bureaucrat would think this is a good idea.
Sorry, but the $10 a day fee isn't going to the hotel - it is going to the service company with the 1-800 number on the little card in your room. The hotel does not have anyone you can call about problems getting your computer connected up.
Yes, the geekier crowd doesn't have a problem, but when someone that can just barely use Outlook is trying to get connected up and has no clue they need someone to call. Enter the service company that takes over the help desk functionality.
Guess what? They are charging the hotel per use and letting the hotel take a small cut. The hotels obviously believe they need the help desk function and are just passing the cost along.
Minneapolis is rolling theirs out right now and I just don't get it.
Ours is rolled in with a new (separate technology) wireless setup for municipal vehicles and police cars, also by the same company rolling out the internet service (the projects are tied together).
My best guess is that the city wanted to replace the cellular-based data service in the cop cars and get something more flexible, but nobody would pay for a huge project like that on its own merits, so it gets tied to citywide Wifi, which gets all the coffee-swilling urbanites hot and sweaty imagining downloading iTunes or blogging from any of the few square meters of this town not covered by SOME kind of free wifi already, making it easy for the dreamy-eyed liberals on the council to vote for.
I suspect that the dirty secret is that the city has promised to pay better-than-they-should for the municipal data network in order to pay for the money losing wifi system, which nobody will use (we have a "good" DSL rollout (eg, you can choose ISPs and the speed is decent) and cable, anybody who wants high speed HAS IT already).
I called my council person (ditsy Betsy Hodges) and bitched about the project and asked her who was going to use it. I was told that it was inexpensive for inner-city residents who couldn't afford cable or DSL, of course she had no answer how these poor people could afford modern PCs but not some kind of internet access. Maybe that's the next socialist giveaway.
I do worry, though, that the company running it will turn around and say "its a money loser" and threaten to close it down and the city will bend over backwards to give them more money before they lose their precious "community asset."
The only hope is that the equipment they are deploying is all software-radio based and that with little physical upgrading, the base stations can be reprogrammed for new wireless standards and make the network actually useful.
I'm not against municipal data projects, either, but I think that they have to provide something actually USEFUL (eg, fiber to the curb), not some 10-15 year old tech.
It's a little too early to say how it'll work out. I've only just recieved and set everything up, but I have to say, I like the idea of having your own customers help spread a wireless mesh network. Granted, it'll succeed or fail based entirely on the effort put in by said customers, but in light of Sonic's desire to share the ad revenue I don't see why people wouldn't be willing to at least give it a shot. Santa Rosa's both small enough that Sonic won't lose that much money if it fails, but large enough to provide a good idea of the challenges of doing it in a city. I'm curious to see what the next few months will bring.
Ne Cede Malis.
So, how *do* the seashells work? Oh, and when can you introduce me to Sandra Bullock?
668: Neighbour of the Beast
You know, that somewhat sizable city north of the border. According to the article, we have the highest density (100 per sq/mile) and the highest connect speeds. But other than those two nuggets, no other info in the article.
As I recall though, the scope of the Toronto Hydro Wi-Fi project is quite limited in size to the real core of the the downtown core.
http://www.onezone.ca/index.html
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
When I think of wiring a City up with this I always think of two parts:
1. Wiring a City - that is putting a network in the city that connects all the points of a city togther with some good connections. Then:
2. hooking that network up to the internet
Thinking in terms of cost, seems like breaking it into these stages might help.
The problem is who wants to hook up to a network if it's only local stuff. As a computer person I know of lots of cool things you could do even without the internet part (just peers in the city itself) . But, does anyone know if the general public would get any fun out of this?
examples would include visitor web-sites available via the free city-net to tourists (airports have done this), video calls within the city becoming common, city services like licence branch or other bill paying online, phone books online etc. Basically lots of location-specific stuff that lots of cities make available on the internet now, but you don't have to have an internet connection to be able to offer it.
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
http://videolectures.net/kiblix07_meinrath_wtrr/
There is also a very interesting part on White Space Devices, basically radio devices that would use any available frequency in order to communicate and release that frequency and hop onto another one immediately if the detect someone else transmitting on it. They have presented this to the FCC for the test, which of course was extremely unfair (out of specs) and the technology refused. Some more on his site http://www.saschameinrath.com/.
The Isle of Man, tax-haven and domain of corporal punishment has it's own municipal Wireless Internet Access: http://www.wimanx.com/Wireless/WiManx which has been in successful operation since June '07. Although this is not common around the UK, it is a start and will hopefully spread following on from this good example. However, pricing does put it out of reach of most home users but as we have seen with equivalent technological advances, this is likely to drop once widespread adoption has taken place. But yeah it has been a long time coming and still well overpriced.
Here in St. Louis AT&T was granted the rights to deploy city wide wifi, without any bidding process that I'm aware of. This week they announced unceremoniously that they are canceling the project because they didn't realize that the street lamps only receive power at night and it would be too expensive to work around that. It would be funny if it weren't true.
Pat
Spec, smeck. The fact is that WiFi has improvised itself and works excellently well in outdoor, even rural networks. Did you know that there are many *standard* WiFi links reaching 40 kilometers? Did you know that the backhaul of these mesh network are indeed standard 802.11? Did you know that there are WiFi nodes now that handle over 700 user associations?
Maybe you only know the WiFi of the 90's. It's a lot different now. Do some research.
This seems like as good a place as any to ask... Has anyone tried Meraki's devices? It seems like an ideal way for a community to do muni wi-fi on a limited ad hoc basis. Have the library and town hall buy reasonable amounts of bandwidth, install a bunch of nodes in the area and then encourage neighbors and local businesses to participate at least by buying nodes and installing them. Consumers can help by buying a node for home and plugging it in - they get free or low cost internet and expand the network. And since monthly cost to power a node with no additional bandwidth is so low users are unlikely to power them off when not in use. As more nodes are installed additional bandwidth is necessary and their-in lies the only major problem I can see. The only obvious way around the bandwidth problem is to do something "evil" like add a clause into the contract for the cable company upon renewal that requires them to allow end users to participate in the town wi-fi network. What's that Comcast? You don't agree to that clause? Fine, we will find another company that will. Of course this only really works for dense areas - downtown, main street, densely populated areas and the like will work fine. Neighborhoods of smaller homes on small pieces of property will be fine. Three thousand square foot homes on 1.5 acres will be SOL.