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San Jose Plan Reintroduces Large-Scale Municipal Wi-Fi Coverage
alphadogg writes "San Jose is casting a vote of confidence in municipal Wi-Fi from the heart of Silicon Valley, planning a new, free network just a few years after such networks were declared all but dead. The California city of about 1 million intends to offer high-speed Wi-Fi throughout its downtown, covering an area of 1.5 square miles in the middle of this year. But unlike earlier municipal Wi-Fi initiatives, such as a Google-sponsored network that would have covered San Francisco, the San Jose system will be able to pay for itself entirely by helping the government do its job. In the middle of the past decade, ambitious projects in several cities, including parts of San Jose, promised to blanket outdoor areas with Wi-Fi and provide built-in sources of revenue. Home broadband subscriptions, browser-based advertising or small-business use would help to pay for equipment and operations. But those complicated business models depended on assumptions that often proved unfounded."
The high density of internet in the air there could microwave your brain and make you nauseous and sweaty. Then you will be unattractive to men.
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It's been that the big ISP's and cellular companies have fought these municipal initiatives tooth and nail, including suing and getting their legislative slaves to pass laws outlawing them. A quick search tells the real story.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just bought my first Wifi modem last week to connect to my hotel's internet. It only streams at 30-40 kilobyte/second (slower than DSL at home) and keeps dropping the connection with a message that says "acquiring network ID". Windows XP reports the signal is "very good" to "excellent".
At this point I'm wondering if I wasted my my money. The Wifi is only good for uTorrent downloads (it doesn't mind the intermittent connection), and my dialup connection is actually more reliable for web browsing, facebook, etc.
Oh and yes I've tried moving the modem around which improved the signal, but not the frequent lost connections. Surely this isn't normal for Wifi?
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Much of the work that makes mobile networks usable goes into handover protocols and implementations. Wifi handovers still suck and the problem is compounded by the low range of each Wifi cell. There are proprietary extensions, but if you build a citywide network relying on proprietary stuff, prepare to pay dearly for that decision.
Without seamless handovers, it will be an annoying "now I have access, now I don't, have, don't" toy.
The problem is that they want to offer free-as-in-beer, not free-as-in-speech. After all, if it was libre, someone could use it for nefarious purposes! Think of the children!
As they propose it, it's just cost shifting, and attracting the attention of big service providers who get to sue for anti-competitive behavior.
That's because your hotel doesn't have the network required to support the number of users they have. Its a common problem with most hotels.
That is 100% normal for hotel Wifi.
Even $250.00 a night Hotel wifi.
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Try using a Linux live CD to see if the software is at fault or if it's a hardware or network problem. Wifi is in the same band as many other RF devices. It cooperates with Bluetooth, but most video transmitters will block or heavily interfere with Wifi signals. Other access points on the same channels can cause interference: The signal level can be as strong as is legally possible, but if the noise is also strong, the connection is going to be crap. SNR (signal to noise ratio) is what matters. Without more information, it's hard to make informed guesses about the reason for your problem. Try eliminating the software as a potential cause first.
A couple months ago, I stayed in a hotel with satellite internet. I assume it was some sort of deal the chain had with DirecWay that required using the service at every location because nobody in their right mind would be using satellite internet as the primary entartube in an urban setting. It was ridiculously slow and my 4G hotspot tore it to shreds. Heck, 3G would have been faster with lower latency.
Which is why, no matter where I go, I use my smartphone and PDAnet. Much more reliable and in some cases faster. Now I don't do anything of a secure nature over that, but it suits me just fine for fartin' around on the Interwebs.
Ahhh two people with the same answer. Thanks. Sounds like a good reason to move to another nearby hotel that has almost no residents (and therefore less sharing of the Wifi). Also it's cheaper.
Also explains why the dialup, with its dedicated phone line, never drops connection. No sharing with anybody else (though 5 KB/s is rather slow).
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Paying for itself means that it will generate revenue proportional to the cost of implementing and maintaining it. For any government program to do this is unusual (and this is not always a criticism -- the government is in the business of governing, and it's unreasonable to assume that every or even many sectors of governing will generate revenue).
But "helping us do our jobs" by having WiFi available everywhere is completely orthagonal to this. Will they be replacing government office networks with free, public Wifi? Of course not. Do you want YOUR SSN and government records floating around the local DMV on a public wireless network?
It's been said that big telcos and other ISPs oppose these kinds of things and that's the chief obstacle. Of course they oppose it: the government offering for free what was previously the province of the marketplace to offer is going to drive out private business, since hardly anyone can afford to compete with the government. "But no private company is offering city-wide Wifi!" you say? Could it be that hardly anyone is willing to pay for these services? Business travelers will have subscriptions to Wifi hotspots using a service like Boingo, but not enough people are going to pay to use Wifi in the park. Some will, sure. Not anywhere near enough to make it worthwhile -- and that's why ISPs don't offer it.
It's conceivable that the small city or town exists where it's cheap enough to roll out something like this and worth it to the locals to fund it such that you could have a successful municipal Wifi service. That would be the exception to the rule. You'd think a bigger city would more easily be able to do it, but bigger cities also have more free wifi spots already available, and regular broadband is generally cheaper and better in an urban area anyway.
Here in Philadelphia, free wifi is available almost everywhere in the city. The SSID is something like "Free Wireless Philadelphia" and it has at least fair signal quality almost everywhere I've been (aside from inside some buildings, etc).
However, you can NEVER connect to it. The connection ALWAYS fails. I have never met a single person who was able to connect to it.
After doing some testing, I realized that the problem is their receivers. The transmitters are rather powerful and can be picked up by a laptop/tablet almost anywhere. However, good luck getting your laptop/tablet to transmit strong enough for their systems to even hear you.
San Jose is a successful city, but the downtown area is unusually dead. For thirty years, the city has tried various initiatives to "get downtown going". They put in light rail. They built a convention center, a sports stadium, some parks, a plaza, and several museums. They encouraged the building of large office buildings.
It hasn't worked. Several of the big office buildings are empty. There's little retail. The "nightclub district" is a row of boarded up storefronts. It's not run down, or even dirty. Just vacant.
Offering free WiFi in the downtown area can't hurt, and it's cheap.
Tempe, where the downtown area is dominated by the ASU campus, set up a free WiFi system a while back in the downtown slightly-off-campus area. As far as I know it is still operating but it was simply to attract people with computers to the bars and restaurants. It isn't that large an area and probably doesn't cost that much to operate. Hopefully the Tempe taxpayers - who are paying for it - find it not too objectionable.
Chandler got hooked up with a company called KiteNet which put access points on lightpoles in a fairly large area of the center of the city - much larger than the downtown area. They were sellling it as an alternative to the cable companies, except with cable you could get 10-20Mbs and their wireless configuration was a mesh with only a few connections to the Internet. Hence, the speeds would be pretty low with a lot of latency as the signal bounced from access point to access point finding its way to a wired connection. You might have 10-20 access points to go through or possibly even more in some places. Today the access points are still on the lightpoles and still powered up as far as I know - but the connection to the Internet was terminated years ago. Nobody signed up to pay and therefore the company closed down.
Nobody was going to pay for wireless access that is really slow but wireless with the sole advantage that they could connect to it on the streetcorner half a block from their house. No, they didn't have coverage in major parks or really anywhere that someone might sit around.
Municipal WiFi can be a taxpayer-funded gift and stick around as long as the taxpayers want to keep on giving the gift away. The problem with this comes when the gift starts to intersect with commercial offerings - unless we want the government to act as an active competitor to business it is an area they should stay out of. And for the significant percentage of the population that really has no interest in WiFi anything, who is going to make the compelling case for them funding it for the folks that want it?
More to the point, I think even a lot of businesses have figured out that you can't make WiFi pay. If it is free in a coffee shop then if the coffee is good people might use it - but the majority of customers aren't interested. If it isn't free in a coffee shop nobody is going to pay and hopefully they are there for the coffee anyway. Most of the "municipal" or bar-and-restaurant-area open area WiFi systems have figured this out by now. Even airports have started figuring out that if it isn't free there will not be enough users to pay for the equipment maintenance and connection fees - so they need to figure out some other way paying for it.
WiFi doesn't pay for itself. Hotels are probably the last remaining bastion where paid WiFi access is common and mostly that is outside of the US. You can't make it pay for itself no matter what you do without a captive audience and there are few places where you have a captive audience that needs to have a WiFi connection.
Just bought my first Wifi modem last week to connect to my hotel's internet.
When I hear "wifi modem", I think of something like this, which no way in hell you'd need that to connect to the hotel's internet connection. Did you actually mean you picked up a router to plug into the wired port in your room so that your various devices can connect to it? Or... just how old is your laptop that it doesn't have a wifi transmitter/receiver built in?
Satellite net is usually the same speed as budget Cable internet but with higher latency. In all my previous hotels which provided free internet, they had wired ethernet to all the rooms. It was nice and fast (100 to 200 kilobyte/s).
Maybe I'll try VirginMobile's $50/month plan. Or just stick with dialup ($7) for the facebook/email and let uTorrent handle the hotel's Wifi mess, since it doesn't mind the dropped connections.
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My laptop had the same problem. We had a high-speed wi-fi modem. Friends laptop ran google street-view superfast. You could virtually run 1 mile through a city street at full-screen within 30 seconds. On the home laptop it was slow and chuggy. Replaced the OS, and the laptop was super-fast again.
We seem to have a highly vocal minority that believe the "radiation" from smart meters is destroying their lives. They've managed to convince PG&E to offer an opt-out plan to let them keep a non-transmitting meter. Surely a few of them live in the 1.5 square miles covered by this. Waiting for lawsuit to stop this in 3 ... 2 ... 1
SJ has been going through budget pains. Even cops and firemen been laidoff and/or benefits reduced. There is cost of installing and maintaining such systems which if funded now, can easily be defunded later. I'm not impressed when "they" promote free wifi, however, I found SJC airport has fast wifi (at least the times I've used it). Most airports it is not free and it is problematic. Google has the free wifi in Mountain View though not that great but it's there. Hotels are hit or miss but it seems wifi is like that everywhere. So in long run I have little confidence in large scale free wifi. I think some of /. people can discuss further on throughput rate drop off with lots of user connectivity.
Regarding San Jose promoting downtown, ugh like San Francisco, getting there is a pain, parking there is a pain, I rarely go to these downtown places unless it is a special event I have specific interest. I will then see how I can use public transportation (i.e. park at some other place convenient then use LightRail). For San Jose events downtown like parades or Christmas In The Park, I use parking under the Fairmont Tower building at San Fernando and Market (where KPIX offices are, next to Fairmont Hotel). Parking is $6 per evening and somewhat easy to get in and out. Forget parking at Fairmont unless you are staying there, there is ***no spaces*** even for guests and sometimes no room for those staying there. Like all other cities be prepared for very long walk from where you park to where you want to go.
Speaking of events, there is Cinco de Mayo which I have never been to one of these parades, I always have some other event, i.e. ballroom dance showcase same day. Parades are quite festive with dances and music and looks like a lot of fun, usually done during daylight because in the evenings is when the rowdys come in and trash downtown. I think they've cancelled such parades, I remember one year driving through downtown when May 5 was a Thursday. See lots of people waving the Mexican flag, lots of police cars, traffic is diverted and channeled into one way flow to prevent huge backups.
mfwright@batnet.com
Could they save money on municipal communication systems? For example, if they are subscribing to cell-based systems to issue parking tickets, could they use a wifi based system instead? Invest in the equipment and then cut the ongoing service costs.
What about the city-wide WiFi network in Minneapolis?
because the city deliberately killed off the club/music scene to promote cookie cutter franchises that close at 9PM.
WIFI -- woo hoo!, more hipsters impressing each other in coffee shops.
Also try looking for a Starbucks or McDonald's to test against their wi-fi network, which should eliminate your equipment as a source of the problems. The quality of hotel wifi is all over the map.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
A "modem" is what I call a device to connect to online service. It doesn't matter if it's a dialup modem or DSL modem or cable modem or wifi modem.
My laptop is a Pentium 3 but I'm not using it. The Wifi connection I purchased for use with my Pentium 4 desktop that I brought along with me. Looks like this but with a 3 foot USB cord so I can move it around
http://www.bing.com/shopping/zoom-4411-ieee-802-11n-draft-usb-wi-fi-adapter/p/98795B354F5512A5A5CF
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A "modem" is what I call a device to connect to online service.
So you call a router a "modem"? A network hub is a "modem"? What about a NIC card? Is that also a "modem"?
my Pentium 4 desktop that I brought along with me.
You lug a desktop along with you on trips? Isn't that kind of cumbersome?