Slashdot Mirror
EarthLink Says No Future for Municipal Wi-Fi
Glenn Fleishman writes "EarthLink dropped its final bombshell on city-wide Wi-Fi, saying that it wouldn't put more money in and was talking to their current deployed cities about the future. The company had won bids in dozens of cities, and then backed out of the majority of them before building or finalizing contracts a few months ago. The remaining towns they were building out, like New Orleans, Anaheim, and Philadelphia, will ostensibly be turned off unless local officials come up with scratch or a plan of their own. EarthLink pioneered the model of free-for-fee networks, where there would be no cost or upfront commitment from cities, and EarthLink would charge for network access. Apparently, you can't make money that way."
>I only walked a mile or so through mostly residential streets
Try using a car. I recently moved to a small sussex town, and found an open network in a few minutes when I needed internet access to find an estate agent. There are two open networks in my new street too.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I've subscribed to OneZine city WiFi in Toronto, Canada and the signal degrades quickly as you move back from the street. The best signal is sitting on the sidewalk with your laptop ... with the homeless people. You also pick up a strong signal while driving of cycling on the street but ... not a lot of time to use it.
Suffice to say I dropped it in favour of Starbucks Wifi/Bell Hotspots which have a stronger signal indoors. There are enough Starbucks around that I'm never without a connection.
I wonder if the problem with Municipal Wi-Fi, or Wi-Fi in general, is that companies like EarthLink are trying to operate with their hands tied behind their back with restrictive power limitations and limited frequencies while the FCC gives away large chunks of the best part of the spectrum to cell phone providers for millions of dollars who then nickel and dime us for every trivial service they can think of.
Perhaps he reason we don't have a ubiquitous and cheap wireless Internet and why TCP/IP mesh networks are *not* on the horizon for the 700MHz part of the spectrum is because the government insists on auctioning off a zero cost medium for mega bucks to legal monopolies who have no choice but to turn around and stick it their customers.
Maybe we need to stop thinking in terms of phone systems when we think about the spectrum and start thinking more in terms of extending the Internet. Just a thought.
Where is your volunteerism?? Why should you expect the government, a company, or anyone else to provide you with wifi service when you can roll out your own??
You are not consumers. You can be producers if you want. Just knock your neighbour's door and ask whether they would like to start a new wifi community network project with you. Connect your home wifis together, and if you find a lot of people to join in then you will have created your own network. Then buy a business plan fixed broadband service or a dedicated line (paid either by the community as a whole or by one richer member who can pay for it) and connect it to your wireless and your network will be connected to the Internet as well.
That simple. Yes, I know, the technology (WiFi) is not perfect and you can't transmit with too much power, but if everyone has a roof and the signal is sufficient from roof to roof, then you don't need anything else. The major difficulty is actually a social one (your neighbors may not understand what volunteerism is), but you should try to educate your neighbors and persuade them why they should join in.
Look what people from my city are doing: AWMN and also look at the photos and some other networks in existence worldwide.
The cage is open guys. You have unlicensed bands that you can use without a permit from FCC or other agency. You even can have RONJA if you like the optical way. You also have telephone lines, modems, and BBS software. Why you don't use all this technology to create free networks? Are you really trained to act only as consumers, expecting that for everything you need you should buy it from someone else? If you aren't happy with what is available, build your own!
I've said this a dozen times in related articles, but I'll say it again.
802.11 is the flat out, 100%, god awful, worst solution for last mile delivery. I work for a wisp that uses Canopy products, and we just laugh at the 802.11 competition. 802.11 performance degrades the more people you stuff on an access point. The limited channels, and the fact that they scream over each other forces competing networks to get into AMP powered frequency wars. The fact that only channels 1, 6 and 11 are clear from each other makes splitting an access tower to more than three 120 degree sectors pretty much impossible. And neighboring towers will interfere with each other. Oh, and because of how 802.11 does time sharing, essentially Ethernet collision detection with a few hacks on top, one nasty user can monopolize 95% of the available bandwidth for himself without much effort. And this is just my experience in the countryside, where we have few competitors to the last remnants of 802.11 we still have deployed. The reason no one can make money deploying 802.11 on a massive scale is because operationally speaking, it costs a bloody fortune to maintain.
Just because Moto's canopy is proprietary doesn't make it bad. They have been very good to us, old client radios work with newer access points, whenever a new generation of access points comes out, they have an awesome trade up deal that lasts for months, giving us plenty of time to give our customers the best speed available, without breaking the bank in one mass upgrade. There is an active 3rd party mailing list, that Moto monitors and responds to, an entire community of support from end ISPs, and mountains of documentation.
Do wireless right, make money, do it 802.11, and spend hours on the phone with irritated users who want to switch back to dialup.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.