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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
Why bother making a comment if you don't know the language? Ile sans fil = literally island without wires, ie wireless island.
You are mighty good at typing but I still don't see how a pipe with bits in it is any different than a pipe with water in it.
So you are saying that because Internet usage is not metered, therefore it should be run privately? What if they metered your Internet usage, like, say, Comcast does? One could very well meter Internet usage and charge for it. Poof goes your argument.
You've put yourself on a slippery slope and even provided your own grease. Your argument about wasteful government is unsubstantiated drivel. The government can run things very efficiently if it wants to; take a look at many small towns these days. They are running their water, fire, and school departments on ahoestring budgets, without fatcat CEO's skimming off the top.
Ile sans fil refers to Montreal (QC, Canada)'s free wireless initiative.
http://www.ilesansfil.org/
It isn't government managed. Instead, its an NPO that offers to manage the AP, if a sponsoring store is willing to purchase the AP (~100$), pay for the DSL connection (~65$/month) and an administrative fee (50$/year).