Persuading A City To Go Wireless?

An anonymous reader submits "We keep reading about cities dishing out free wireless; Philadelphia, San Francisco, Austin, TX, and many, many others. But how does one go about forming a group to get their city to go wireless? Looking around, there are a few articles out there, but most deal with selling it to businesses. I haven't been able to find a definitive guide to "Getting your city to go wireless". So I send my plea out to the Slashdot community - just how does one go about getting your city to go wireless?"

Austin is wireless?

[dougmc]

Living in Austin, I was quite astounded to find that the city had gone wireless.

Clicking on your link, I learned what I already knew -- many businesses offer wireless access. Oh. Hardly news.

So, to answer your question, you do not convince a city to go wireless. You convince indivual businesses to do so, or if you run a business, you do so yourself.

Muniwireless

[YeOldeGnurd]

A few of us in Medford MA have just begun discussing how we would go about convincing the city to offer wireless. We've all been reading the reports at MuniWireless.com" [muniwireless.com]

We're getting there, but I am still screwed

[multi-flavor-geek]

I live in Duluth, Minnesota (great white north), and we are making a lot of progress througth tech kiosks and access points in touristy areas to become more and more of a wired city, unfortunatly duluth is geographically a huge city since it is about 50 miles from one end of town to the other despite that we only have about 85,000 people. Since I am in the hinterlands on one end I woul never be on an access point, and even if they did set one up it would only be able to serve about 20 houses. And since, despite being in town I am in the middle of nowhere I can't get wireless, dsl, or cable, and those phone wires hand hammered by Thor himself don't support anything faster then 28.8. Help!

Provides government infrastructure...

[neiffer]

I think the article author might misunderstand what it means for a "city to go wireless." Many of the cities mentioned don't have any sort of universal infrastructure, but rahter a network of patchwork wireless ranging from free hotspots from ISPs promoting their service to wireless home users who intentionally (or unintentionally) allow people in their area to use wireless. As for a city, Spokane, Washington has a large, city-supported and funded wireless hotspot in their downtown area which they greated to give public servants (from parking ticket writers to police officiers) a data network using cheap, off-the-shelf technology. You many want to consider that route.

Correction

[stephanruby]

I don't know about the other cities, but in San Francisco, it's not the city that has gone wireless -- it's a group of people within the city that have set up free wireless access points.

It only takes one person to set up something like this. You set up your own free wireless access point and then you tell people about it. Eventually, you can meet with other people that have done the same, share information, and form a user group. And when enough of the people at the right locations have joined your group, then you'll have pretty good city-wide coverage.

Re:Offer to pay for it

[FauxReal]

Yes, take the Personal Telco [personaltelco.net] approach.

Persuading a Continent to go wireless

[gtoomey]

In Australia we have a numerous local wireless meshes that are being joined to make a mesh spanning a continent.

The infrastructure you need included:
- IP assignment policy across the continent
- a node database [uq.edu.au] that has a Geographical Information System to tell you where to point your antenna to find neighbouring nodes
- local interest groups [ddwireless.net] that help businesses & individuals go wireless & advocate at the local level

Re:Need

[zorander]

I would say that "magnitudes" is unreasonable. Many government programs have high levels of administration overhead. This is a fact. Government overheads are also much higher than corporate ones, in general. Logically, a company with a profit motive has much more reason to be efficient than a government program run by bureucrats with no personal stake in the matter.

Conservatives often claim numbers like 70% as far as administrative overhead goes. "Orders of magnitude" would imply that the real numbers are more like 0.7% (two orders of magnitude). This is ridiculous. If you're going to claim that conservative's claims are ridiculous then at least don't make unreasonable claims doing so.

Re:Need

[stephanruby]

"I would rather the government..."

If the government takes care of this instead (instead of private individuals, non-profits, local businesses, and coffee shops). It will be run just like your local Public Library. You won't be able to access porn, games, and mp3s (even legitimate ones). Your access will be monitored and tracked for "security" reasons (remember the story about Homeland Security complaining about free wireles access points). And just to err on the safe side, your wireless connection will be crippled, this way you won't be able to bypass the controls that government will impose on you (for your own good). And eventually, the city will propose a bond measure and a new tax to pay for it.