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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.
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.
Towns and cities can do this easily. It's so easy that it's trivial.
It's so easy that people deployed it themselves in disaster relief scenarios despite opposition from the government, rebellious little municipalities with practically no budget deployed it themselves, hell, soldiers are able to drop a bunch of little scurrying robots and set up a wireless mesh network in a blasted urban war zone.
The technology renders large amounts of infrastructure obsolete, turns the technology into a piece of infrastructure no different from roads and sewage, and makes some very profitable businesses defunct.
This is why established businesses oppose it and politicians are paid to prevent it. That's pretty much the sum of it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
As my sainted grandmother would say, "Bad cess to them!"
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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?
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.
The problem is that a lot of big companies get to a certain size and power when they can afford to abuse their own customers because they are able to ensure that their customers have no choice. They form little cartels and engage in anti-competitive practices. They use their immense resources to brainwash the public and destroy any competing company, especially if that competing company offers a better product.
When you hit that point, these companies are worse than the government. They have just as little need to be efficient as "the government", and they really don't have to please their customers anymore. The big difference between themselves and the government at that point is that the government has at least the pretense of "the public good" as a goal, whereas corporations only have "maximizing shareholder investment".
Yes, you can choose another corporation, and you can choose another government too. But in neither case to revolutions come easy.