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."
Wi-fi was not designed for this type of situation. It's great for small places, but not city wide. Does it even matter anyway when most places offer free wi-fi?
Wait for wi-max or something similar.
Check that out. a company goes into many wifi bids, wins most of them, and then suddenly decides 'city wide is not worth it'.
thats foul play at its best. proxies, they are.
Read radical news here
Since WHEN does Earthlink know ANYTHING about providing good service for the public?
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Do you just walk into random houses and use their computer or phone whenever you feel like it as well?
Have you ever actually looked for any? I have. I went war walking with my Nokia 770 this week, in the first-world municipal area where I live (Sheffield, UK). Either reports of open wireless networks all over the place are greatly exaggerated or the people of Sheffield are unusually security conscious. So far, other than intentionally open networks, I've only found one unencrypted network and that wouldn't give me an IP address. I only walked a mile or so through mostly residential streets, but it certainly gives lie to the notion that you can just "use whatever is nearby".
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
When they make and win the bid, why aren't they legally obligated to follow through with it?
for example in the eastern part of germany, after reunification, there were lines in cities that could not be used for DSL. the german "freifunk" (literally "free wireless", both as in beer and as in speech) project managed to build some sizeable city mesh nets using a routing protocol known as OLSR [1,2].
just look in awe at the leipzig cloud [3]. also, try to imagine wireless cell phone / pda mesh nets (probably doable right now with openmoko).
[1] http://olsr.org/
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3626.txt
[3] http://db.leipzig.freifunk.net/uptime/png/ -- careful, images is 3165x4206
>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
but i live in germany and most private networks i encounter in berlin or munich and also smaller towns are encrypted. yeah, WEP is easily crackable, but you do not want to face time in jail here for posessing aircrack-ng [1], do you ? [1] http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1629259
I live in Kelseyville which is in Lake County, California. Lake County is home to California's largest and oldest natural lake (~9mi across at the widest point) and a bunch of grapes and not much else. We get lots of tourist traffic in season and it's just full of the local hicks, octogenarians and meth-heads the rest of the time. Obviously there are deviations but honestly those are the largest demographic groups in the area. I drove around the lake one day - no side streets, JUST around the lake - with my laptop, netstumbler, and my garmin gps12. It's a decent little GPS but it's based on pretty old antenna technology and has no external (that's the 12XL.) I was using a PCMCIA 802.11b adapter, a PRISM2 card made by Siemens, which has an external antenna jack but I have nothing to put in it. Not even counting hotels with open wifi, I was able to locate literally dozens of access points. Probably the open ones outnumber the closed ones about 2:1.
I had similar success in Marysville, which is a couple hours to the east and a damn sight more populated. I suggest you try this exercise in a car next time, as the other commenter says. But I don't think it has much to do with population or tech-savviness. I think you just didn't cover enough area.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If there's a sign in front of the house that says "come on in and use my phone for free" I won't think twice about it. You don't HAVE to broadcast that your net is available.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
Down here in Southern pansy land, there are open access points all over the place.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Non-argument. Wifi routers usually come wide open by default and non-technical people don't usually know how to go about locking them down or hiding them. Not quite the same as your front door.
If their music radio was playing loud enough that I could hear it, should I still ask permission to listen?
~ Ron Fitzgerald
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.
People shrug at these deals and delays and say they are "free" to the cities.
But there is a huge opportunity cost when these muni wifi projects stall out.
When cities cut deals that grant right of way and other concessions to a particular vendor, it tends to keep other players out of that space.
Ann Arbor is a perfect example. The vendor contracted to do the muni wifi (20/20 Communications) is struggling financially and has no idea where they will get the money to complete the project or when they will do it. And yet they keep signing up more cities. They look like a bunch of bozos who never had a real plan. They overcommitted themselves. They have FAILED. They should just give up and give other competitors a shot at delivering service.
Of course AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, Comcast and Charter *love* this. They don't want you to have alternatives at the edge. For them, the longer companies like 20/20 stall and delay, the better. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn there has been some backroom dealing between the companies.
Dang, the project is delayed again with no new completion date. But it is going to be free!
This is yet another example of the general public being fucked over by a so-called P3: Public Private Partnership.
The idea is that instead of the municipal government setting up an organization to perform a specific project, they basically contract out the job to private firms. Supposedly this will lead to more economical and better quality service. Instead, what we've seen time and time and time again, is nothing but higher prices, and far shittier service.
Then we get cases like this, where the private interest just pulls out of the deal when it's no longer profitable for them. Of course, it doesn't matter that they've fucked over the community. A lot of the time these companies have little to no ties with the community they are servicing, so leaving the public there high and dry causes these private firms little grief.
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!
Amusingly enough, the owners of the device should be paying broadcast fees to the RIAA equivlent of the broadcasters.
It's a fucked up law.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Do you just walk into random houses and use their computer or phone whenever you feel like it as well?
Do you ask permission to use a drinking fountain? You know water isn't free.
Here in Finland, a company called Digita is rolling out something they call @450 broadband, basically they're using the old NMT frequencies to provide wide-coverage wireless internet access at a max speed of 1mbps. Apparently they've been open for business since april, 2007, and TeliaSonera is said to begin offering access to the network starting this December.
Some links, all in Finnish:
http://www.450laajakaista.fi/
FAQ:
http://www.450laajakaista.fi/9023/9022/9046
The main points in the FAQ seem to be: Suitable for wide-area networks, requires a separate modem, either an external box or a PCMCIA card. No pricing info released yet, my sources told me "a couple of ten euros per month". Useable on moving vehicles. Available speeds: 1024/512, 512/256.
Coverage:
http://www.450laajakaista.fi/Missatoimii/9092/9093 (map dated 15th october 2007, unfortunately PDF)
Colours mean:
blue: Useable indoors without external antenna. Also useable outdoors.
dark purple: Generally useable outdoors without external antenna in parks and such, indoors with antenna. Mobile use requires external antenna.
light purple: In order to get a connection, a directional antenna must be deployed outdoors, e.g. on the roof of your home.
The coverage is being extended continuously, per schedule it should cover all of Finland by the end of 2009. In principle it sounds quite good to me, the speed however means it won't be a replacement for regular wired broadband. For mobile use, though, if the price isn't too high, it might not be too bad a deal.
You call that wardriving?
This is wardriving...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Of course you can't make money this way, that was clear to many people years ago. Earthlink just wasn't paying attention.
If you want to know why, just look at the work of groups like Personal Telco Projectin Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Maybe that is how to stop the vehicles driving by blasting music way too loud. Threaten them with a RIAA lawsuit.
~ Ron Fitzgerald
It's a great point. In some cases, EarthLink had won a bid, but not started contract negotiations. In some cases, a contract was on the table, but not signed. In some cases, a contract was completed, but the city hadn't executed it (often, a mayor works out the details and a council approves it, and then a utility has to be involved to agree to pole uses).
Where a contract is in place, EarthLink will have to unwind its obligations. In Houston, it paid $5m for not starting the network. In Philadelphia, they will likely pay out millions to walk away.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
there are no so many home networks left open that one can just use whatever is nearby.
This is why my routers DNS entries redirect to a particular website with a particular image. You know which one.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.
To be cost-effective, the people installing it need either a guaranteed income stream or a reasonable chance of attracting enough paying customers to make it worthwhile.
In cities where most home users who want Internet already have it, this is tough.
WiFi does work well in parks and other public facilities where the WiFi provider doesn't have to compete with cheaper services. It also works well in hotel lobbies and hotel rooms that that lack convenient wired connections.
Wifi simply does not have the economy of scale that WiMax or G3-phone-modems have.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It just yet.
Eventually i think it will become another utility like water or sewer or trash pickup, paid for by yet another line item on your local taxes.. That way the government can claim 'the basic human right of wifi to our constituents' and the ISP/Telcos can make guaranteed money. ( x$ per house in the area regardless of your intent to use, much like schools do now in many areas )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Do you ask permission to use a drinking fountain? You know water isn't free.
Except drinking fountains are the equivalent of municipal wi-fi -- paid for by taxes to benefit the public, or provided inside a publicly accessible building for the benefit of visitors. Unless it's in a private, non-publicly accessible building, they are generally understood to be available to anyone, with the cost of the water provided to strangers being willingly paid for by the owner.
I think the example you're looking for is: "Do you ask permission to hook your hose up to your neighbor's faucet to water your lawn? You know water isn't free."
I run a wireless ISP in Texas. I still don't understand the logic. I thought most companies using the give it away logic died during the dot com bubble. We use a number of different technologies, non of them including 802.11x We provide a high quality of service, and charge our customers for service. Even with a good business model and paying customers, this is not a business for the light of heart or capital. If you give it away, they might come.... but you will go. Marco Coelho Argon Technologies Inc.
"No....well.. maybe?" said techno-dork #1.
/Sorry
techno-dork #2 responds, "I cant quite put my finger on it.."
Then t-d #2 adds "But it's a simple theory. Free wi-fi, happy users, equals profit!"
T-d #1(who is the smarter of the group) "I think I see the problem..
free wifi + happy users = profit?"
t-d #1 adds "the eqaution is missing a constant...
free wifi + happy users + money = profit"
DOH!
(ducks)
(ducks again)
Time for analogy wars!
... access granted" (access points must receive a request for use, and then grant permission)
Do you just walk into random houses and use their computer or phone whenever you feel like it as well?
Yes, I do, if the computer/home has all of the the following attributes:
-There's a big sign outside that says "computer in here" (access points advertise their presence)
-There's an instruction set outside the house that says "To access the computer, rotate the knob on this door and push forward. Walk into home, then enter second room on right. Press power button, wait for authorization, and then use." (access points tell you how to use them)
-After pressing the power button, a message says "request for computer use received
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
In case anyone cares -- those payouts in the cities where the contracts have been partially fulfilled are the result of "liquidated damage" clauses in the contracts, if you care to learn more about it.
-Alex
An open network with no authentication scheme or other access restrictions invites usage. This is different than cracking their WEP password scheme or forging a MAC address. Those are the equivalents of breaking in and taking something not freely offered. A wide open network is offering free access. You have to ask permission to physically be on their property, but if you can access it from your own property or other public area then you should be fine.
The only payout I'm aware of is in Houston, and it wasn't for that reason. Where else?
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
We have a government that we pay taxes for. Make it a public infrastructure investment. It would be one of the better ones. This what we are supposed to use public services for. For when the private sector can't/won't do it. The choice is ours.
What?
Duh, why weren't they using their heads from the beginning? They should have come up with a free-for-taxes solution. The system is installed all over a city, everyone in radio range uses the wifi for free, and the city immediately begins paying the company on a regular basis out of some new municipal tax that it would collect. (This could be an additional fee tacked on to the various municipal cell phone fees, or some other thing). Everyone would have to pay, even if they never use it, in the name of having free wifi all over the city. Earthlink would make zillions even if nobody ever used the darn thing. This might sound far-fetched, but remember that politicians don't give a hoot when it comes to your money, and also it's akin to the Walt Disney Company convincing the cable companies to increase everyone's monthly rates by $5 and start including the Disney Channel in the basic package. That way, everyone (even people who didn't order it) started receiving the Disney Channel "for free," and paying for it. It was sneaky, and if Earthlink had been wearing their thinking caps, they would have come up with a similar one for city-wide wifi.
Then blame the manufacturers.
And then blame the standards bodies as well.
There needs to be a reliable, automatic, technical way to let people know it is ok tou use your wifi.
People who want to use the only way available, so as things stand, blame the manufacturers for having this as the default as well.
The standards bodies could have forseen this and had a seperate open and not-open broadcast...
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Because rerouting your DNS is so much easier than just setting up basic encryption.
Because rerouting your DNS is so much easier than just setting up basic encryption.
Yeah, but the thought of inflicting mental scars that will never heal is so much more satisfying.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Did you just keep hitting the "scan for networks" option on the 770? It's not always the most reliable... Especially if the signals are fairly weak.
Also if an AP is inside a building, depending what the walls are made of you might not see it.
Try installing kismet on your 770, and get a bluetooth GPS... Then drive around and see what you find, you can even plot a nice map showing all the points. I drove around a few residential streets here and found several hundred by driving around the outskirts of a housing estate. Of those, about 30% were open.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Netstumbler is awfull, all it does is send out probe requests which make it blatantly obvious what your doing. It also won't detect cloaked access points, give you any idea how many clients are connected to each ap or log any unencrypted traffic thats receivable by your card. Try Kismet or KisMac (mac gui version), it works a _LOT_ better.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
It's more fun, tho just changing the DNS is pretty stupid because someone can always access servers via direct IP, or simply hard set their dns servers. My laptop runs it's own dns cache that directly queries the root servers itself, because of ISPs with unreliable nameservers.
On the other hand, I had an intentionally unencrypted wireless network that dropped you into a honeypot network with a few funny sites, the only way out was through a vpn server for which you needed an appropriate cert.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Whatever happened to that term, I don't see it used much anymore and it certainly isn't being prevented. OS vender sells anti-virus subscriptions... sounds good to me! Internet service providers being contracted to provide free Wifi and shrink their own customer base... sounds good to me! Huh... wonder why it didn't work out? I'm in Portland where MetroFi is spreading their add supported WiFi service, as soon as a hotspot opens that's accessible from my place I'm canceling my DSL. Clearly the ISPs notice a trend of canceling subscribers as free WiFis roll out. It's basically going to kill them. So how could anyone trust Earthlink to roll this out in the first place? I guess the idea is "trust them" even though logically they shouldn't be trusted for that project. Perhaps "conflict of interest" is just a rude phrase these days.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
if someone's livingroom lamp happened to be bright enough to illuminate part of the sidewalk, and if someone is walking down the sidewalk and takes out a piece of paper to read in the light, is that 'stealing'?
So I'm not the only one who has thought of that, hmm? Anyone else ever found themselves wishing for a handheld EMP generator to deal with those rolling boom boxes, if such a device were possible? I'm also going to lobby Congress to legalize Sidewinder missiles for personal use on the highways...at least for my personal use.
This space unintentionally left blank.
If you bought a house, and on the house was a sign that said "Come on in and use my phone for free," wouldn't you take it down if you didn't want people doing that?
I wasn't getting into the ethics of using private open wi-fi networks. I was pointing out the stupidity of using 'Do you ask permission to use a drinking fountain. Water isn't free." as a rebuttal to the example of walking into someone's house and using their telephone without permission. To keep the water analogy, I pointed out that using someone's telephone without permission is the same as using their outdoor faucet. It is not the same as using a public drinking fountain. A drinking fountain is the same as a municipal network--meant to be publicly available and no permission required--so cannot be compared to using home telephones or private open wi-fi networks.
They'll drive through a neighborhood and see all the access points that aren't WEP or otherwise obviously protected and assume that they're all clear. But they're not. If they actually bothered trying to connect to the internet through those points they'd know that most are locked to a particular set of MAC addresses or use other access prevention methods.
In my apartment, walking from one end to the other my laptop can see about 40 unqiue wifi points. About 10 are "open." Only one can actually be used to get to the internet.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Idjits.
know that I am going to say is going to be very popular but here goes anyway
I think a federal investment in public WIFI in all major urban areas would pay for itself in a few years, given greater economic and educational opportunity.
This is my sig.
Even a "private" open network that is broadcasting into a public area can be used. If I can find a wireless connection without trespassing on anybody's property that does not require any authentication, I believe anybody could reasonably presume that it was intended to be used.
The difference is, you're blind, so you don't see the sign yourself and no one tells you about it.
That is not entirely correct, OLSR does have problems with numbers close to 1000 nodes. However, there is a new protocol in development to provide a Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (B.A.T.M.A.N. [1]).
[1] https://www.open-mesh.net/batman
I worked closely on the system in Philadelphia from a design and deployment perspective for quite some time as well as many other MESH/WiFi systems throughout the country. While I'm not going to get into the technical limitations since they can be debated endlessly, I think the majority of Earthlink's issues stemmed from their business model. There simply are no guaranteed dollars in the model they designed these systems on. You cannot expect users with the vast array of options they have to choose a system such as the one in Philly or any others throughout the country. They had high hopes for their subscriber counts, thinking that they can penetrate low-income areas by subsidizing the costs of PC's and laptops (bridging the digital divide). Ultimately, I believe technical users had little interest because they don't want to pay the high monthly costs and be tethered to a city when their alternatives can be fairly easier afforded with far fewer limitations. Low income users pay a much smaller monthly fee but I'd be very interested to see just how many have signed on, I can't imagine many have. Surely, the local gangs would see far greater benefit in it, I could think of dozens of uses they could immediately get out of such a system. Instead, such a system should have been designed with public safety and utility in mind. Yes, there are even issues with that and it could lead to a whole other discussion, but it's a step in the right direction. But had Earthlink used public safety as their base (traffic incident cameras, crime watch, etc.) they could guarantee a certain amount of dollars and open a lower percentage of the bandwidth for public usage. I believe it's exactly where they're headed now that the business model has been exposed as a poor one.
This has been the case for years. Also, Cities don't make money from roads or sidewalks, yet people expect that to be part of what they 'get' when they go shopping.
Either treat them like roads, or give an incentive to business to provide them for there customer and the city could only lay out the plan. a plan would be needed to ensure there not stepping on each others toes in any manner.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't care if someone knows what I'm doing, I don't want to detect cloaked access points, and I don't care how many clients are on an AP. If someone wants to hide their AP from me, then I let them. I don't try to get on APs that aren't totally open and providing addresses via DHCP, because I am not a dick.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's stupid...
More clients = more congestion...
More traffic = more congestion...
More traffic from different networks on the same channel = more congestion...
Cloaked networks still generate traffic and congest the channel they're using.
I can see 6 open access points from here, 3 of them are uselessly slow because they're congested with users and all on the same channel.
Also when setting up your own access point, it's due diligence to determine what other access points are around you, including cloaked ones, and what channels they are on.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I live out in the boonies and no one else's network could possibly overlap mine. And if someone has "cloaked" their AP, then the burden falls on them, not me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"