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Why Municipal Wi-Fi Networks have Been Such a Flop
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Sep 28, 2007 04:39 AM
from the on-the-town dept.
from the on-the-town dept.
Jake Melville from Slate shot us a link to one of their stories that outlines why municipal wi-fi failed but also tells of the too-rare success stories. While cities that left their wi-fi in the hands of the private sector fell prey to the "last-mile" problem, grassroots efforts such as that in St. Cloud, FL, have blossomed.
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Submission: Why municipal wi-fi networks have been such a flop by Anonymous Coward
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Long story short: (Score:5, Insightful)
As a politician, you can't 'sell' citywide internet access as easily as you can public transport, sewer system or power. It's not one of those "must have" things, it's one of those "why should I have to pay for it" things.
It's easy to get other municipal expenses explained. Citywide public transport? Ok, you may have a car so you might not need it, but if everyone did, you'd be in jams longer. Gas? Duh. Power? Duh! Sewer system? DUH!
Internet? Huh? Interhet? Hell what do I need that for, eh? If someone wanna use it, they gotta pay it, 'k, not on my tax money!
Should we reach the point where internet access becomes so much a part of everyday life as tapwater and power in your apartment, we can talk about it. Before that, no politician would survive it, politically, to suggest blowing tax money into internet.
It could work akin to public transport, where you pay a (nominal) monthly fee, but then, in how many cities could that work? I mean, it would certainly work around here, where you still pay 50+ for 1024/256, but how about areas where companies already offer 4mbit+ for less than 30?
Re:Long story short: (Score:5, Interesting)
For starters, you need WAPs everywhere. At least one every 100' if you are using the smaller (12" omni) antennas. Even then, trees and rain cause severe signal loss.
Second, you need to arrange your house based on where you can get a signal. My WAP is invisible from downstairs. I have to put the PC in an upstairs bedroom. And it's not the master bedroom. Once the kids go to bed, no more PC time for adults.
I work in networking, so I was able to get a Linksys with DD-WRT and route that through the house. Less technical neighbors are SOL.
Finally, once the city starts doing the networking, competition will leave. Soon, committees will suggest getting filtering software. After all, public money can't subsidize smut. Or religion. Or hate speech. Pretty soon, the only unblocked sites will be Disney.com. What will the power users to then?
Overall, our solution works okay. I make a lot of money on the side installing boosters and antennas and routers. I also get calls constantly when the signals drop. During heavy rain, I just turn my phone off. Try explaining propagation fade to Sally Soccermom...
Parent
Get a bloody repeater, mate (Score:5, Informative)
Um... get a WiFi Repeater [wi-fiplanet.com]?
My access point is in an upstairs bedrom. If I want direct line of sight from my shed, no signal, an old brick washhouse is in the way. So I got a thirty-quid repeater (actually just a regular access point switched into "repeater" mode) and installed that on the corner of the washhouse (in view of both the bedroom AND the shed). Now 100% signal in the shed.
There really isn't any magic to installing a WiFi repeater. Plug in to your PC, configure over a web browser with the SSID and encryption key, disconnect from your PC, plonk it somewhere where it can see both you and an original access point. Job done.
If I can figure this out in my 100-year-old farmworkers' cottage in rural England, I'm sure as hell you can figure it out in a modern US city gated community. It really, really isn't hard.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Also, the signals bounce off of metal sheets just like a mirror.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But to tell most people that they need to purchase additional equipment; they balk at that.
Also, the provider advised that too many repeaters would just degrade the already-weak signal. I have no idea if that's true or not.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>>I work in networking, so I was able to get a Linksys with DD-WRT and route that through the house. Less technical neighbors are SOL.
Why the contradictory statements? Either you got it to work or you didn't. And since when was DD-WRT a requirement to ru
Re:Long story short: (Score:5, Insightful)
Was home electricity really a 'part of everyday life' before electricity generation and distribution received any substantial government investment?
Parent
Re:Long story short: (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that. Even not counting any expenditure on the backbone, the vast majority of broadband connections in the UK are ADSL, which uses the phone network installed by the nationalised Post Office Telecommunications.
The point I was trying to make was that, given the GPP's criteria - that a utility has to become 'everyday' before it should receive government funding - we would have no electricity in our houses.
Re: (Score:2)
*sigh* yes, but the electrical distribution network ("national grid" in the UK) was set up with substantial government funding
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm, what uglyduckling said. I'm not against the provision of utilities by private entities (although I think it should always go through a nationalised wholesaler), but the government has a role in the setting up of the infrastructure which would otherwise be uneconomical, as a catalyst to further development.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed. Much of the US would still be without power and telephone service today if it hadn't been for actions taken by the federal government. There was simply no economically viable way for private sector companies to provide such service to any place other than dense, urban areas. But as such services became more and more necessary to our way of life, those areas that didn't get it would become less and less viable as places for further development. For a government with an interest in seeing a flouri
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that economies of scale don't always apply...there is also the law of diminishing returns. As a city gets larger, it needs more raw materials. Growing food usually requires land. Requiring more food means requiring more land. So, the food must come from further and further away. If everyone lives in the city, the food producers must travel a long ways to get to work. Same for the coal-miners whoa re integral to our power
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, there are(education for example). But I believe these services are very rare, and electricity is not one of them.
"Sure, and people on the poor side of town should just move into the rich neighborhoods, since private industry certainly isn't going to waste money wiring areas where the demand and ability to pay isn't high enough."
If people on the poor side of tow
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And don't change the argument, within cities, DSL is available in even the poorest areas. The poor in the US are still relatively affluent, and it is still very profitable for infrastructure companies to cover them.
DSL's availability is a matter of demographics, but that isn't the same as affluence -- it's all about rate of return. Upgrading a central office to support DSL is a very expensive proposition for a phone company, and they need to get a certain number of subscriptions to justify it (obviously). A densely-populated urban area is a better investment than a subdivision where all the homes are on quarter-acre lots; even if the subdivision's per-household income is much higher than the urban area's and the perc
Re:Long story short: (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, no. Until the government got involved -- over the LOUD protests of the private utilities -- electrical service in rural areas was virtually non-existent. Pretty much like exactly like broadband and Wi-Fi today in fact. Read this Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Utilities_Service [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Good game, Earthlink (Score:2)
I work for a municipality (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather spend those millions to benefit a school and get educational software into Florida's failing schools. Or hell, open an entire new school so kids don't have to wake up an hour earlier to be bussed half way across the city. There are just so many way this money could be used better. That's why municipal wifi doesn't take off.
Parent
As a user on the St. Cloud system (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Long story short: (Score:4, Insightful)
Those of us who live in the such a so cold "backwater country" laugh that you actually believe you're only paying $15 dollars a month when you're really paying much more than that to download those stupid Hollywood movies when you factor in the extra tax money collected from you and used to subsidize the infrastructure.
$15 dollars is a small percent of the actual cost you pay. You're just too stupid to understand that. You actually believe that when the goverment forcefully takes money from you and spends it to pay 80% of the cost of something and then charges you an additional 20% on top of that if you want to actually use what you've already partially paid for, that you're getting some kind of deal.
Parent
No money = no wifi (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a no-brainer to see why municipal wi-fi wouldn't work without significant investment. I'd guess we're talking about millions of dollars even for smallish towns. And yes, the last mile (or even the last few feet) can be a real problem.
I was recently at a conference in Göttingen (Germany). My hotel room had wifi (that I paid for). Still the connection was intermittent and had tiny bandwidth, even though the router was in the hall outside. One morning, I had to start an x-terminal session to a computer at my home university to run Mathematica. The connection was so slow that I just gave up and went to use the local campus machines.
It would be nice to have free wifi, and maybe this could work as a low quality service for those who can't afford anything better, but for the moment, I can only see this happening through increased taxation, and probably only in the richer neighbourhoods.
I'd say the reality for communal wifi is that it could work on a much smaller scale to begin with. Maybe a street could pool together some money to pay for local wifi and lock it in with WPA passphrases. We might eventually see a network of these streets, building Municipal wifi one block at a time.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
X11 requires good bandwidth and low latency.
If you were in Germany and assuming your university is in the U.S., the sheer latency kills X11 protocol regardless of the bandwidth.
Sun Ray, VNC, ICA(Citrix) and Remote Desktop protocols works over these links. Try one out.
Cannot be compared to college campuses (Score:2)
College campuses can also easily curtain competition with their wi-fi where as pointed out in the article competition already exists, let alone good service, or existing offerings in major cities.
I would love a wi-fi st
Re: (Score:2)
The zoning thing will eventually resolve itself for most people. But I am curious about where you plan to store maybe 100KwHr of electricity as a reserve against a week of cloudy weather.
one word - cost.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:one word - cost.. (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I only know of one person who can actually get the service in his home. The WAPs are too spread out to get coverage unless you are outside. Or unless your are downtown, they have them concentrated there.
I cannot get the WiFi from my home, so I still have to pay for my own Internet access.
So, not only am I not saving those $300, I am actually spending an additional $300.
If a city is going to charge everyone in the city for a service, they better provide it to everyone in that city. Kinda like garbage service... I don't see anyone in the city not getting their garbage picked up.
I was cool with it when they only provided it downtown (the pilot program). It was sort of an economic boost for the businesses there, but it was a waste of money to deploy it for the entire city.
Parent
Oulu, Finland, panoulu network (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There is no real competition between PanOULU n
The Minneapolis Rollout (Score:5, Informative)
Is coming along with nary a hitch, as far as I can tell. They started late last year, have a good chunk of the city up and running under it already, and should be done with the whole project by the end of the year. I don't have any real-world experience with it (I live in St. Paul), but I haven't heard anything but good about it, so far.
Seriously, the city is making setting up wifi look about as difficult as slapping together legos; I can't figure out how these other cities have managed to screw it up so badly.
And the St. Paul city government just voted to go with a fiber optic rollout for their municipal broadband. Of course, no word on where the $200+ million is going to come from to pay for it, so it's really just vaporware at the moment.
But God knows there's enough fiber laid down out there up to the curb. It's been almost ten years since they buried those suckers; might as well light plug 'em in and see how well they light up.
Re:The Minneapolis Rollout (Score:4, Informative)
I agree the Minneapolis roll out seems to be going very well. I live in Minneapolis and here is why I think it is working:
- They chose a smaller company (USInternet) to do the build. This means the company is committed to customer service and building their reputation, rather than just extending their monopoly like the big telecos would have tried to do.- The City of Minneapolis set itself up as the biggest customer of the network, to provide network access for public services throughout the city. That way, USInternet has a guarenteed customer base that is large enough to make the network work, even if few other people sign on. At the same time, Minneapolis gets a wireless network that is cheaper to lease from USInternet than it would be for Minneapolis to build it themselves internally.
- The service is not free, but still half of what existing ISPs are charging. This gives USInternet a growing source of revenue as the network grows.
- US Internet is building a network in a modular fashion, which makes it easy for them to move things around and upgrade parts, even mix in WiMax in the future, as the needs change.
So good technology, sound financial planning, and finding the right company seem to be what is making the Minneapolis network happen.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada (Score:2)
Wrong Approach (Score:2, Interesting)
its all rather simple (Score:5, Insightful)
In the pacific there have been free wireless access rollouts that are problem free. I mean shit, if an Island can manage it, so can a city ffs.
My suspicion is that the march of technology is hampered by the greed of individuals.
Re: (Score:2)
I harbor the opposite suspicion: The march of technology is almost solely reliant on greed.
It's obvious... (Score:5, Interesting)
However, once people realize the current limitations of AP's and how much infrastructure behind the whole thing that needs to be put into place and how much it's going to cost to put that infrastructure in place, they run screaming from the project.
Here's what a town should do...
1. Don't try to put wifi everywhere, instead focus on places like downtown. Realize that your going to have to put *some* infrastructure in, but encourage businesses to install AP's through tax incentives. Come to understand that places that you going to have to put wifi is going to be expensive because the cost of the gear (outdoor AP's are expensive)
2. For everywhere else, subsidize it. Hire someone who knows what their doing and come up with an equipment list that a household would need to become part of the wifi network. (my thinking is that it would be a specific router with a specific config). Then send mail to your local citizens offering a tax credit to anybody who installs an access point. Heck you could even purchase them in some ridiculous quanitity that you could resell to make a profit.
Note, the only thing I haven't addressed in this scenario is technical support and the fact that many telecom companies have issues with them using their service to give service to others. Though I suppose as long as your not making a profit, they really can't say much.
Just my idea.
Re: (Score:3)
The only problem is, then how are the municipal politicians going to get those fat campaign contributions from the telecoms?
That's the real problem with Muni WiFi: the companies don't like it, and we all work for the companies.
Rule #1: It has to work (Score:2)
Oooh, oooh, I know! (Score:2, Interesting)
geneva switzerland is a success story (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.freepress.net/news/25957 [freepress.net]
Does not need discussion (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do you think there are no collapsing bridges or ditches in Europe? Not because people there are smarter, but because the idea of planning for decades ahead has been learned by countless desasters in the past. The US settlers could have taken that lesson with them. Instead my impression is that infrastrucure is build on a level that suggests people do not really plan to stay long in one place.
Re: (Score:2)
What does that mean? Does it mean that the city always plans right or does it mean that no matter how faulty the city's planning, it will not go into bankruptcy?
A bankruptcy or a loss is a sign from the market (i.e., the people who buy the product or service) that your product is not needed, is expensive or that it is inefficient. That could be because of faulty planning, poor execution, low investment, malinvestment, bad luck, bad marketi
WiFi security (Score:4, Insightful)
So if I'm going to pay for a personal access anyway, tell me why should I be thrilled at paying into the cities 'free' WiFi scheme?
Re:WiFi security (Score:4, Insightful)
For other stuff, VPNs/ssl tunnels/whatever are fairly easy to put together, and I agree someone should do that so your browsing isn't transparent to anyone within 100 meters of you.
Parent
it can work (Score:2)
It's not city-wide by any means, but it's where it's needed.
What about lawsuits (Score:5, Insightful)
Why muni WiFi *should* fail (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm happy to see it flop! (Score:4, Insightful)
Municipal wifi is so cheap that there really is no reason we couldn't do that *and* build a fiber-optic network; I mean, it's an order of magnitude cheaper so why not do both. Fast networks are already crucial infrastructure, and will be even more so, particularly in a city that considers itself a capital of high tech. Private industry isn't going to get it done. So just step up and *lead* already. I can't believe I live in a rich, densely populated, supposed high-tech capital and the best broadband I can get for less than $100 a month is this shitty 1.5Mbps/384Kbps DSL!
Wrong technology for this application. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've done a few medium-size wireless deployments and the core problem with 802.11 is that you need to drag a wire to each access-point....and in a city, you need a lot of access-points. Management of these huge networks is a solvable problem (Meru and Cisco have done a pretty good job with that).
Sure there are mesh-network technologies like Ricochet (remember them?), and WiMax is around the corner - these technologies are actually designed to cover very large areas to minimize the amount of access-points and cable runs. These technologies might be more promising.
In the end, municipalities need to fork over the cash, and implement the correct technology to make this succeed. Without cash and good decisions, these wi-fi projects are doomed.
-ted
wisp coops are the way to go (Score:5, Informative)