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Is City-Wide Wi-Fi a Dead Idea?
An anonymous reader writes "Remember all those projects to cover cities with Wi-Fi? The BBC wants to know what happened to them. When it comes to underground wireless data access, there are obvious issues regarding implementing a wireless infrastructure in underground stations and tunnels, but above ground the BBC suggests that it may be other advancements, such as Wimax, that have made Wi-Fi a less attractive solution. PCMag, on the other hand, suggests that public Wi-Fi isn't dead at all and will make a comeback due to the increasing popularity of Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. So, will city-wide Wi-Fi make a real comeback, or have other technologies, such as Wimax or 4G, killed the concept for good?"
Free and open wi-fi access vs cellphone account with account charged per fucking byte.
Yeah... I'll take Wi-Fi thank you very much. Fuck the cellphone companies and their insane nickel-and-dime fees.
With high speed cellular wireless access? Ummm, it's probably dead. You'll get islands of wifi, but complete coverage is unlikely.
Why is the particular technology of wireless communications so important?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Minneapolis has complete downtown coverage now.
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/wirelessminneapolis/
Actually using it right now to post, doesn't really seem like a dead idea from here!
I am allergic to Wi-Fi.
And it causes cancer.
It probably contributes to global warming too.
The problem I've had with it is that each access point I've encountered usually requires a login and/or a fee to use. For example, Wifi in Starbucks requires a monthly fee from AT&T (or T-Mobile, can't remember). Across the street the library is free. The McDonalds next door charges $2.95 an hour, along with the Wendy's across the corner. The lobby in the hospital is free but requires a login that only the clerk at the front desk can provide. There is Wifi in the mall that is free.
I think that most people would prefer an all-or-nothing approach. Give me one Wifi experience or forget it. Having to keep track of a new login method every 200-500 feet is a hassle.
Its being killed by 3G and the iPhone. Five years from now few people will bother with ADSL or cable to the home, so they won't route to wifi.
Laptops are starting to come on the market with 3G modems built in. Telcos are starting to install small cellular base stations close to their customers. Pretty soon I expect the telcos will be doing a lot of the networking which used to be done in house.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
On a parallel topic, practically every home router now comes with WPA2 on by default.
I'm surrounded by a sea of BT home hubs which are probably idle, and can't even connect.
Outrageous.
The problem was that the original plan in many cities was to have free and low cost service. I think they underestimated the cost to setup wifi across the city. The premium package planned in this area was far slower than DSL or cable services and more costly. There's also the possibility that commercial interests by cable and phone companies contributed.
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Living in a "wifi city" (Minneapolis) I would like to comment on our municipal wifi and its utter failure. The signal is simply terrible in 90% of residences despite the massive unsightly box on the telephone poll out the window. Frankly this is thanks to the terrible range of B/G wireless. To get a decent signal we will need better tech like WiMax or some form of 4g. As it stands it is nearly impossible to get signal to everybody who wants it.
... unless you count political manipulation by telecoms as a "technology."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
WiFi has a limited future anyway so who cares? The future is becoming increasingly clear ... over the next 10-20 years most existing air protocols are likely to be phased out in favor of GSM LTE. LTE (and the "Advanced LTE" which is likely to become the actual deployed 4G technology) offer speeds in the hundreds of megabits/sec range and latency in the ~millisecond range. In fact LTE is very close to the theoretical limits of what is physically possible to do, speed wise. LTE is also being designed with support for femtocells in mind right from the start, in fact, there seems to be growing consensus that 4G mobile networks will primarily be deployed through LTE gateways in the home first with traditional cell-tower style macrocells coming much later.
LTE offers some compelling advantages over the mixed 3G/WiFi tech we use today. Firstly, authentication and billing are solved problems. WiFi is made significantly less useful by the way every public hotspot has its own random billing infrastructure, often with pages that don't work well on mobile devices. Because GSM/UMTS sim cards are secure devices, the same convenience that 3G offers today will be possible everywhere, with operators either paying for the ADSL backhaul on their own, merging with cable/DSL companies to become vertically integrated radio/landline companies, or simply paying people who run LTE femtocells for the cost of the backhaul.
Secondly, LTE is a natively IPv6 based protocol. That means that if you use an LTE/4G enabled NetBook in combination with a home femtocell, there won't be any crap related to WiFi NAT routers as long as you're connecting to an IPv6 site. The devices will probably be controlled and leased by the operators and so won't suffer the same featureitis that has made home internet so flaky and requires so many bizarre workarounds like UPnP today.
Thirdly, hand-off actually works in mobile protocols. 4G/LTE devices will be able to transparently hand-off from your personal home femtocell to a macrocell when you walk outside, to a 3G or even GPRS/2G cell if you roam out of range .... all without you even noticing. Try that with a WiFi based system!
Finally, the LTE protocols include support for true single channel multi-cast. For this reason it can not only replace 2G/3G and WiFi, but also digital terrestrial TV broadcasts, as well as digital and FM radio with no loss in spectrum efficiency due to needless retransmissions.
LTE + IPv6 is the most efficient and user-friendly way to use limited spectrum, period. 20 years from now other air protocols will seem like an anachronism.
Why cant they simply use Ethernet over powerline to get internet to the trains then have APs retransmit inside the train? makes more sense than all the wireless stuff mentioned in the article (as a bonus, due to the variable latency its pretty useless for phone signals :D )
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WiFi hotspots work for covering businesses, but they spend a lot of money for covering and maintaining a small area.
For something like a whole city, WiFi simply isn't the right technology: its range is too limited, the protocols aren't designed for it, and it requires too much maintenance.
Cities can (and probably should) try to offer access in public places: parks, public squares, public buildings.
The range is too short, it always has been too short for any of this sort of stuff. I wish there was a longer range version of Wifi that an ordinary person could actually buy a router for without having to spend thousands.
4G and LTE will always be controlled by large, evil telcos and you will always need a subscription. I doubt anyone will be allowed to set up their own private LTE access point as nice as that would be. It would be nice if there was a version of LTE that you could use in unlicensed spectrum with affordable equipment and without dealing with a mobile phone company and proprietary 'locked down' equipment like that femto cell Verizon has with a GPS to make sure you are not setting up an AP outside the country
Cablevision is gradually WiFi'ing their entire subscription area.
I'd bet on it killing it's self. I've worked with wireless (WiFi) for 5 years implementing them in RV parks, Hotels, and Apartment complexes. There are a lot of issues with just the nature of wireless that cause people to fret away from it.
One of the first reasons is there's no seamless way to roam from one access point to another, if it were possible to shell out a few thousand dollars and make all access points go to one gateway using a fiber optic underground network, then it "might" stand a chance but yet again you'll run in to the problem of your radio's not being aggressive enough to roam from one AP (access point) to another on the customer's side. Me and a few of my coworkers in the past have tried many different methods of making it seamless only making it 'kinda seemless' by using 2-3 different radios.
Second reason, is the very nature of wireless it's self, this 2.4ghz, or even 5ghz isn't good with distance as well with going in/around objects that get in it's way, You could be in an RV with an AP less than 20 t, with a 10+ db radio and get 1 bar of signal, but move to a window and it'll go to 4-5 bars? Buildings aren't made to let WiFi go through it. Being in Portland and watching their wireless city project die was sad but they couldn't shell out the support they would need in order for everyone to get connected, and stay connected. We're talking hundreds of brick buildings with very tiny windows. I'm sorry the makers of WiFi never expected it to ever be used in a city-to-city setup, and that my very well caused it to die. Wimax, and G4 networks, are made to tackle city's and City WiFi will never compair.
This is a Mac, what you have there is an embarrassment to your fellow computer users.
http://www.ci.bellevue.wa.us/municipal_wireless.htm
Before I gained sentience (circa 2007) and fled the area, Oakland County Michigan was rolling out wifi. How's that going?
The BBC wants to know what happened to [city wide Wi-Fi].
Shouldn't a news organization like the BBC do some reporting and find out? Certainly more than simply phoning up someone at BT.
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The 2.4GHz (and higher) frequencies simply can't penetrate through walls and stuff well enough.
But wasn't one of the goals of moving to digital broadcast television to free up some of those nice low UHF and VHF frequences? Hell, even just getting down to 900MHz would be huge, and once you get down in to the regular VHF frequencies, you can push the signal through damn near anything.
As soon as one city can demonstrate how a wifi infrastructure can benefit a city by more than the investment to build and maintain it, then all cities will have them. So everyone who wants city wide wifi should band together and designate a few specific small cities in which to build and demonstrate the business case for city wide wifi.
If you have your own wi-fi and spare bandwidth, open it for free use and let others piggyback on your connection.
Government at all levels -- federal, state, and local -- has done such a splendid job at whatever it's undertaken (public education, DMV, road maintenance, etc.), I think they should enter the ISP business too. With government's reputation for excellence in cost efficiency, product delivery and customer service, we're sure to get better ISP service from the government than we do today under private companies. Yea, government! So good, so great!
Akron, Ohio's network is up and going.
http://www.onecommunity.org/programs/programs.aspx?id=518
...
-- Don't raid my house FBI, there's nothing to find here except dirty socks and full ashtrays.
The idea was free, basically anonymous wireless Internet access...
Does not matter if it was WIFI or an other technology... I am sure something like automatic switch from "hotspot to hotspot" could also be developed, but that's not the point.
The idea of free wireless Internet access was killed by 9/11 and the following "war on terror". No free access operator would want to face legal torture, should someone do anything sinister using their service.
Philly officially closed off its city-wide wifi in May 2008 for reasons clearly stated in the link. When it was up, it was practically unusable anyway. I lived within a block of an access point, and I could never hold a consistent signal. But truth be told, I only used it towards the end of its life.
And that is why I personally think IPv6 is stillborn and won't catch on. IP just doesn't work for the increasingly mesh-style networks we are using. Wifi roaming isn't a bitch because of Wifi--it is a bitch because of IPvX. All these other "3G" or "4G" aren't going to fix the problem, they have the same problem that Wifi does, they use IPvX. They are just a way for huge cell companies to charge us up the ass for internet we already pay up the ass for at home. They hack soon-to-be legacy protocols like IPvX into a mesh (plus real-time-billing). They aren't the future.
IPv6 will never catch on in a big way. Something that looks like a low-level version of bit-torrent will catch on instead. It will solve all the mesh problems we are having now. It will be peer-to-peer instead of a giant hierarchical tree where everything funnels through a few big players.
And for those thinking it will take "years"... remember how fast IPv4 was adopted. Win 3.1 was using IPX/SPX or netbeui. All the games used IPX/SPX. Nobody did TCP/IP except unix and trumpet winsock. Then within a few years all the games were TCP/IP only. Maybe I remember wrong, but did seem to be a pretty short adoption curve.
My prediction will be that the switch will be a quick one. After all, most of what we exchange is content. Most of our websites would probably not have to be re-worked much to ride on another protocol--though the new features offered might make them partially obsolete anyway.
Maybe I'm way off. My point really is Wifi isn't the problem. The problem is TCP/IP. The more mobile computing grows, the more pressure there will be to move away from IP.
I work at a company that provides free wireless almost everywhere in Cumberland, MD.
Clear (clear.com) has been advertising pretty heavily in Atlanta for city-wide Wi-Max. I can't speak for how well it works, but I can only imagine that they are getting a decent amount of business, seeing how they advertise more visibly than any other company in ATL outside of Turner.
I dunno about other places. But a pretty good chunk of downtown Charlottesville, Virginia is covered by free municipal wifi, and it works OK. Not everywhere, and no, you can't "seamlessly roam from one hotspot to another," as they say.
But so what? The signal is reasonably reliable where I've tried it, on and near the downtown pedestrian mall, and the throughput is significantly better than that provided by the coffee shop or the library, even with the trees in full radiation-absorptive leafy-mode.
Maybe "municipal wireless" means something more ambitious, like everybody who lives downtown gets a big honking signal even in their basement, and I don't think that's what they're trying to do here. But it sure is useful to be able to assume that, no matter where you get your latte, or slice, or dumpling, you'll be able to get some work done.
That doesn't sound "dead" to me.
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This is a contest between capitalist greed and the Common Good that has barely had the battlefield defined as yet. What we've seen so far are just the clashes between the upstart Rebellion's scouting parties and the evil Empire. No one has come forward to organize the splinter cells and create a united front yet. If the Empire succeeds in dividing and conquering, there may never be much of a Rebellion.
Luke and Leia, where are you?
They are deploying these in public locations like parks and stores. Unfortunately they are only deploying this network in their service areas, and they are not public. You need to be a cablevision subscriber to access them.
Why yes, I am a subscriber - so let me tell you about them.
If you are outside they are great - assuming there is one near you. Once you go into a building - forget it. The signal falls off a cliff, and the service is unusable.
As cool as public Wifi would be, I'm not holding my breath for it. It's the wrong technology for the application.
-ted
WiMax operates at 3.5 Ghz, 2.5 Ghz, but also at 2.3 Ghz.
There are also manufacturers who build WiMax gear at arbitrary frequencies when those licensed frequencies are available to a company that wants to deploy WiMax. These are sometimes outside the WiMax Forum's certified profiles, but if the vendor and the operator agree on it, that's up to them. There's little reason why one couldn't deploy WiMax at, say, 900 Mhz or even 700 Mhz, assuming that the spectrum is available to the operator and the manufacturer can develop and implement.
I pulled into a parking lot in Milpitas to make a phone call and use my computer. I didn't need to be online for the call, just look at stuff, but I was pleased to see that there was a wireless signal, they've got tons of free access points all over Milpitas, and the signal was pretty good., It wasn't foolproof - they have a login-timeout browser window thingy, and connecting to my company VPN meant killed its connection so it cut me off after about 5 minutes, but that was enough to download any new email, and I could log back in without the VPN and see the web and my home email just fine.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm sitting in Hong Kong Airport - free wifi seems to be working well - the transit area of the airport seems to have more shops than my home town does so I guess that makes it a small city in its own right
A buddy of mine lives in Minneapolis in a stucco house. The chicken wire mesh used to hold the stucco onto the house acts as an EMI cage. So he has to be sitting next to a window to get the city WiFi. In this case I wouldn't blame the vendor specifically. But others commenting might be correct about other flaws in the system. I just think the house design for much of residential MPLS might be a contributing factor.
Seriously, are we talking free WiFi or pay? Free, city-wide WiFi may be dead, but city-wide WiFi will happen, but probably in the form of something like 4G. I am currently online using Xohm WiMAx. Plenty fast, and cheaper than the alternatives.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
I'd guess it is dead due the wrong connotation with dead cars.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
www.lawrencefreenet.org
I wrote a long article for Ars Technica nearly a year ago that looked at the past, present, and future. The reality hasn't changed much since then.
Most so-called municipal Wi-Fi projects involved a handful of companies absorbing all the initial network cost in exchange for some to no city business and access to citizens for coverage. EarthLink, MetroFi, Kite, and AT&T were the most prominent. EarthLink got out of the business; AT&T still does some metro-scale networking (Riverside), and MetroFi and Kite shut down.
There are a ton of networks run entirely or nearly so for public safety and/or municipal purposes that have been very successfully in Oklahoma City and elsewhere.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Most of the people reading this are part or fully nerd. My mother is not. My brothers and sisters are not. My grandmother is not.
This is the fundamental reason why City/Municiple WiFi is doomed.
Lets face it. People like to buy subscriptions to things. Cable Phone Internet.
When they subscribe the vendor does all the thinking for them. The vendor either does the setup or provides instructions even my father could follow. As a subscriber you have an expected level of service from the vendor. For example: my cell/mobile phone will work anywhere. Cable is restricted to the living room and bedroom etc.
People do not want to constantly have to deal with drop outs dead spots etc. 3G for example does have these dead spots. However almost all vendors have a fall back network. This fall back is 99.99% of the time transparent, accept for speed.
What is the fall back for City WiFi. There is no consistant answer. Of the readers of this post I'm positive most of you can think of many possible fall backs. Problem is that it is most likely up to the user to configure/select/switch/acknowledge a fallback option.
People are lazy they will always gravitate to the option that involves the least effort and thinking. City WiFi in general is not that at all.
Paid for 3G 4G 5G...... is more likely to win every time. Why? It has a QoS. It just works. I can complain to someone when it's broken. I can get the vendor to fix my issue if I need. City WiFi does not always have those traits.
Far as I see the solar powered routers on street corners have been uprooted and sold for surplus. Story we got was that throughput in the test quadrant was never anywhere close to what was promised and contracted for with the insinuation that the model itself is flawed.
the Portland attempt at city-wide wifi, MetroFi, shut down a year or so after launching. The company could never turn a profit off of the ad-supported free service. I think WiFi is just defunct for this use, the infrastructure costs too much for it to work out. in Portland we have Clear and Comcast High Speed 2go, both of which are based on 4G WiMax technology. They offer better performance at a much lower infrastructure cost than WiFi.
I might be stupid, but that's a risk we're going to have to take.
If its like any other GSM based service, the rates will be outrageous.. with stupid limitations like "evening transfer" "night time transfer" "transfer friends", and charges by the megabyte.
Unless its flat rate, unfettered, and competitive with current real ISP's it will be nothing more than an expensive flop.
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The basic problem is the cost per square mile was too high. To get anywhere near 100% indoor coverage required 40 AP's per sqare mile. With AP's costing $1500-$11000 and engineers starting out saying that only 16 AP's per square mile, companies got into it, found out service sucked, then added more AP"s. By the time they got it right, they were out of money at $100-$200K per square mile. There just wasn't enough market to support a multimillion capital expenditure. The trick is to do some actual RF engineering instead of listening to manufacturers and network engineers who had a 4 hour class and were now RF experts, as to how many AP's were really needed. Then do a real business model and quiti giving it away for free (Metrofi was the dumbest idea out there, free Wifi in exchange for reading ads which kept competitors out). With new AP's costing as little as $100 and 802.11N specifications, it's time for WiFi to come back.
Unless, of course, he's got one of these.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Today healthcare, tomorrow tax-supported wifi preferably on the backs of propertied non-individuals. AT&T surcharge, anyone?
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it is just limited in what range it can cover.
I think Wimax or something else will replace it and be backwards compatible with the Wifi B and G cards so that even legacy systems can get on it. But it will need Wifi repeaters with long range antennas to cover a wide range. I doubt such a system would be cheap to implement, and even if it is implemented it won't be free but pay only.
Then again the electric companies can offer broadband via the electrical outlets, and then you'd need an adapter to plug into any electrical outlet to get on their network. Since most places have outlets and electricity one can log in any place with an adapter. Not wireless, but an idea to get more people connected using the power lines.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I disagree with the previous posts. In that case, technology matters.
A good city wide network should
- handle proper user density
- have a good coverage
- handle multi-media application such as audio / video over IP
- terminal should have a good battery life and reasonable costs
Please note that
- Wifi is certainly not designed to handle user density unless the number of access point is high. Until 802.11n, all users share the same radio channel in a pseudo random way. No frequency allocation,
- the above characteristics makes current wifi standard unfit for true bidirectionnal application such as video over IP as we do not have a true two way simultaneous communications. Even with 802.n, the number of available frequency is so few that only a few people would really be able to beneficiate the proper quality. This does not match the need of high density areas.
- it is a known fact that Wifi has not been designed with battery life in mind. A lot of wifi equipped terminal makers are struggling with this issue.
When comparing the other potential tehcnologies : 802.20e (Wimax) and 4G / LTE, there is no much choice
- 4G / LTE has the expected characteristics but is so complex that it is out of reach of medium sized organisation.
- only Wimax stand a chance.
Then you have to deal with safty regulation on radio protection.
Yes, technology does matter in that case.
http://www.ives.fr/
I started up a WiFi service to cover my town - I invested my own money into equipment etc and got everything I needed to start up. Within days, I had about just about every organisation in the town on my back, pressuring me to shut down. I ignored them and carried on - pretty soon I found organisations suddenly backing out of agreements (e.g. for building use). A little investigating later I found various places had been offered cash up front to give another organisation exclusive access for transmitting WiFi from the building, although none of the organisations have done anything with it. It put me out of business in the end, so I sold the kit and enrolled on a University course.
Very fishy.
In Hollywood, FL they only recently turned up a free public wifi service:
http://www.hollywoodfl.org/wifi/wireless_hollywood.htm
The downside is it only really works outdoors and the latency is in the 300ms-700ms range - but still fairly stable.
The upside is it's free and public, and all you need is an antenna outside your house or a laptop within range of the majority of the city or downtown area. I doubt it'll survive without coverage for indoors, but it's much better than the alternative.
I was ranting in my blog about how there's a last-mile deficiency for the poor when it comes to computers and the internet. We need more publically-available free computer terminals, but cheaper computers are making this less necessary. This free internet is also a major boon, allowing people to educate themselves. It also opens them up to a whole world they might not have had any access to due to economic or other reasons.
Here in Aachen (Germany), a relatively small town, there's a service called OecherWLAN, which is basically a network of access points with pay-for access at monthly rates.
They do provide free access to a number of city-run websites (like the local library websites, pages for tourists and stuff like that), but access to the rest of the internet requires their VPN client...
When I miss is cafes having open wifi for customers. Posting to Slashdot from while drinking a Latte Macchiato is much nicer when you're not paying 24c/MB for GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA...
Two words:- Artificial scarcity.
[i]"Where do you put in the meter?"[/i]
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Things like this make me realise that I need to stop being so hard on the Debian developers for their own political inclinations.
Corrupt, broken Capitalism is going to be responsible for the extinction of all life on this planet, include human. I originally prefixed that with, "if it is not stopped," but I think we all know that it isn't going to be. The people profiting from it currently will continue to do so, right up until the point that it kills both them, and everything else that breathes along with them.
At times I hate it with a degree of rabid savagery that is sufficiently intense to risk causing organ failure. For the good of the rest of the species, Ayn Rand in particular should have been repeatedly stabbed and allowed to incrementally bleed to death before she ever had a chance to put pen to paper.
Not dead as were doing it at http://www.ptawug.co.za/. A community run and managed wifi network that spans Pretoria. I think the main thing stopping adoption in most places is there are easier and cheaper alternatives. With the Telkom monopoly in our country its cheaper and easier for us to build our own network.
we started a wifi community project (non profit, and no internet access)
in pretoria, South Africa, 2 years ago,
and we grew from 4 users, to 560.
complete non profit network, running only on user donations and expansion.
www.ptawug.co.za
For some reason people are clamoring for a "public option" with healthcare, but not a public option for wireless broadband. I hate to be cynical, but I predict that consumers will continue to be metered to death by the telcos. No doubt they will charge separate fees for 4G access in the home vs 4G on the street vs 4G roaming to 3G, and maybe even for every hand-off between cells. Every measurable event in the network is a possible source of revenue.
As with the data plans today, they will kill consumers on per-access charges for these network events, which of course no one in their right mind will pay. So, we'll take their "data plus" offer which tacks on an additional $20 per month fee for broadband to our existing data plan. Even though we will know that using the new network will actually reduce the telco's costs since new technology is always cheaper than old (Moore's Law), we will suck it up and pay. And pay, and pay.
Now is the time for municipalities to get back in the game and make sure our laws will allow cooperatives or local governments to build out public networks that are non-discriminatory and low cost.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Nashua, NH USA was supposed to have free wi-fi also, announced in 2003, 4, 5.
Unfortunately Verizon Wireless (which sells "data" plans at an expensive $60/month) went to the state capitol, and lobbied to stop it.
In most US states, cities can NOT negotiate for or install free city wifi unless they keep the speeds below 128kbk.
The way the lobbyists arranged it, you have to lobby your city to then go lobby the state legislature (and good luck with that).
The USA has fallen WAY behind the world in terms of Internet and wireless. Sadly, I think this is exactly how some people want it.
No account/login required, over 1100 access points, free for everyone.
More information (in english can be found here) http://www.panoulu.net/index.shtml.en
It works very well, and allows me to surf at beach, university, home, nightclubs... everywhere :)
The town I live in has a free municipal provided 802.11b network in the 'downtown' areas; admittedly though ~12 city blocks in size. It sometimes goes wonky and is inaccessible for times, but it's there, and it's free, and works the majority of the time.
As a company, we actually looked at offering Wifi as a for-pay last-mile service, but the reality of our tree coverage and distances (towns in the south US are a bit on the sprawl-side) meant we'd put APs so frequently it couldn't compete on price with already in-ground stuff (cable modems/dsl).
That doesn't even include the horde of open-access points the college students usually put up either.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
If I want it secure I have to create a VPN back to my home computer and establish a secure connection that way but it even gets slower then. For me to really buy into a free WiFi network they really need to demonstrate security.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
Minneapolis, MN successfully deployed wifi to the whole city and it works great. Granted, it isn't free but for 20 bucks you get 3 accounts and split between a few friends its a heck of a deal. Pretty decent bandwidth as well.
I agree with this idea, but why call it socialism? Network connectivity is a UTILITY, and utilities have been provided by local governments (and heavily regulated private companies) from the dawn of time. We wouldn't exactly be in Red Scare territory if your city decided to provide wireless network connectivity.
Skype or SIP Voip enabled wi-fi phones.
:P).
This is where a lot of the problem currently resides. Most of the places you go during a day have wireless access and in fact are the places you WANT to be able to receive phone calls (home, office, coffee shop).
There are solutions, the HTC phones (Magic, Dream, and the AMAZING Hero) have transparent switching through Android while most others don't. The HTC phones sold through providers are locked to break this ability.
Outside the box there's the M88+ which looks pretty decent but doesn't quite have the specs to run Skype (how hard is it to transmit a 56kbps data stream?!) at cpu 288mhz.
Basically the whole thing is a software problem and a provider problem. On the software side we need a lightweight Vimbuzz or Skype. On the provider side I don't think people would mind having an extension, I wouldn't if it meant I could get a $20 a year phone # and cut away from the traditional phone monopoly, they spend more on billing than they do providing service.
VOIP is trying to maintain a modest set of services so that anyone can join the game... meanwhile services are trying to lock people into their specific address space (why can't it just use email addresses? sex@skype.com is of course already taken
The other thing that needs to happen is shotgunning, the connection of two internet connections for outgoing and incoming packets, this is what will make all the transition non-sense go away.
Vimbuzz's incoming buzz to tell your phone to connect to wifi and skype and try to receive the call is a brilliant idea.
Sigh, this seems like an incoherent rant but I've done a lot of research and would love to write an article about the technical hurdles if someone wants to pay me for one. That $50 a month that everyone pays their cell phone provider is enough to do a lot of infrastructure and then educate some African children.
So Lawrence, KS has city wide Wi-Fi, it's provided by a company called Lawrence Freenet. http://www.lawrencefreenet.org/index.php I wish more cities would provide access like they do.
Clear can't seem to give me coverage from a site 10 blocks away over flat terrain.
Their solution?
Either mount the modem in a box 5-10 feet above my roof or switch to Comcrap.
When they switch off their old network in a few weeks their going to loose yet
another customer.
Mobile technology has come a long way in the last few years. Smartphones are more popular than ever and Mobile Broadband modems are easy to get hold of, and cheap too. More and more laptops are getting integrated HSPA chips.
In all major cities and the majority of towns, I can get 3.5G internet (I'm UK based). In other locations, I get EDGE or plain old GPRS. Chances are, if I'm in a town/village which doesn't have high speed mobile access, then I probably don't need it that much and get make do with GPRS.
It's also £5.00 per month for "unlimited" access (1GB fair use). Or I can get specific Mobile Broadband packages starting from £10 per month on both prepay and postpay.
So, given the fast pace of the mobile industry recently, I'm not sure that city-wide Wi-Fi is a necessity any more, or whether I would even pay for it if it's available.
Of course, the experience of others in different locations will no doubt vary.
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That appears to be Motorola canopy which is not compatible with wifi and in many cases will destroy all the wifi near by.
Melbourne Australia currently has a network that covers a surprisingly large area and we keep adding nodes. I run one of the fiber connected backbone nodes where we have access to the local peering exchange.
We are even linking to other free wireless networks via tunnels as well so our network now reaches all the way to Adelaide. We are looking to connect to other networks so if anyone wants to link to our network, get in touch with me.
I agree. I'm an RF engineer for a WiFi/WiMax manufacturer. We have many city wide installations that are very successful. Most of our successful profitable installations are in third world countries where the fiber and cabling is very unstable. I prefer WiFi over WiMax until the cost for wimax comes down a cpe is around $1k. WiMax is mainly cost prohibited. I don't know if any of you have tried setting up a WISP but the cost is ridiculous and unless your in a tech savvy city it's difficult to do it correctly without lots of money up front and probably at least a year with good marketing and great sales people. You can at least triple the cost for WiMax.. Just my 2 cents
Here in Sweden it is, i am using my Eee Pc 901 Go with inbuilt 3g, it works excellent. Of course you canÂt download tons of Gb if you are on the countryside but for browsing the net, ip-tele and even watching streamed video from Youtube workÂs. In the cities there are now speeds 7,2 mbit/s. and they are now building for the 4g. LTE
But sure, no substitute for a proper data pipe, i agree. It is more about having a 100% connection with the net rather then downloading tons of gb via torrentprogram. Wi-Fi can never deliver that 100% connection with the net wherever you are but 3g can.
Indeed, in the UK there has been an absurd campaign for people to turn off open wireless access points, presenting all the usual bogeyman reasons (terrorists, paedophiles, and so on). Like the signs everywhere telling you not to chain your bicycle to railings, it seems to serve no purpose except to make life difficult. I wonder if there is a 'Campaign for Open Wifi' that you can join?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com