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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."
"Watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat!"
"But that trick never works!"
"This Time, for sure!!! PRESTO!"
Gently reply
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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>>>Think of the children!
Okay.
When the children grow-up, as they will fairly quickly, I'm sure they'd rather live in a society where they are free to speak, create, and express themselves without restriction, rather than live in a world where their ideas are censored by internet police (Obama's ACTA, Bush's DHS, and so on).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
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.
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?