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?"

Angry mob

[JorDan Clock]

You could try the good ol' angry mob o' citizens :) Some other, less angry methods include: - A petition. Get enough people to sign a petition (get some tourists too) and someone's bound to consider it. - Resarch. Conduct your own research/study (or hire a research/studies firm) on the desirabiliy and benefits of wireless access points through out the city. Be sure to include cheap methods. - Set up a small wireless network at a local park to demonstrate to the city that people want it.

Re:Need

[Anonymous Coward]

Govenment should not compete with private business over such matters.

Why not?

Re:Need

[pigscanfly.ca]

The best way is to bypass your city and instead go after the individual business that would benefit from this. Citys tend to be fairly beurcratic, but if you can go to say a coffee shop and say X more poeple would buy coffee from you if you had wireless which would cost Y dollars (where Y is less than X multiplied by there marginal profit over the span of 3 months) then they will almost always go for it because they can increase there profit
As for convincing an entire city, unless its really small I think your pretty much screwed.

Re:A city is a business.

[captnitro]

Your point is correct, but I wouldn't necessarily say that people in the middle of nowhere wouldn't benefit or want it.

For example, I live in the New River Valley (Virginia), where the entire place is practically nowhere. However, we're expected to grow immensely within the next 10 years because of, among other things: suburban sprawl, low cost of living, cheap real estate, and so on. While the town I live in has a poverty rate of 43% (!) as of the 2000 census, the population is split between poor farmers and businesses attracted by nearby Virginia Tech, which has been very active in the past few years in advertising "you could be home by now" for business because of the aforementioned reasons, as well as the proximity to a Top 30 research institution.

In this case, wireless has popped up all over in the past year because our town council is smart and realizes that if we want to attract business, we should offer business perks comparable to that in a larger area. Similarly, it gets the townfolk out and about and spending money because whereas they might not be able to get DSL at home, they *can* get wireless anywhere downtown. It also costs less in terms of coverage area, despite the startup costs taking a bigger chunk of available funds. Several years ago, towns in the area decided to pay for an assload of fiber, most notably Blacksburg, where VT is located. By doing this they lessened the cost for private owners to roll out wireless, among other connectivity, around here.

The point is, I think there's an even bigger incentive for smaller areas to roll out wireless, or at least the connectivity to make it happen. In a large area, a greater percentage of persons will have broadband, or even Internet access in general, so the argument could be made that wireless is a benefit mostly only for visitors. But in a small town, it can benefit the entire community with a much bigger payoff.

"Backbone"

[lkstrand]

The wireless "backbone" could be running OLSR [olsr.org] - as described here [tldp.org].

Re:A city is a business.

[UserGoogol]

A city is not a business. The goal of a business is to make money. The goal of a government is to serve the people. (Of course, in practice the government might acquire greedy people who wish to control the government for their own personal profits, but that's not what's supposed to happen.)

As a result, businesses will try to have their profit margins as large as possible, whereas governments should not, because serving the people is their end goal, not making money off of their services.

non-US cities?

[Saville]

This is off topic, but this discussion really made my curious. All those cities listed are American.

How do cities in other countries compare? London, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto, Athens, Seoul.

Hermosa Beach, California

[valmont]

the city i live in has been unwired since this summer [blogspot.com].

Find/Start a company

[g3head]

Last year my community went wireless thanks to a small start up. 802Link [802link.net] started by going to the chamber of commerce and the various downtown improvement groups and convinced them to launch a wireless network, working a lot on tourism (the community has 3 or 4 big festivals a year).

His original plan was to sell the service like an ISP but last time I talked to the owner he had made it more reliant on consulting and setting up wireless networks. Now the business is attracting as many industrial clients as commercial operations.

To a degree the city has also latched on but working with the local businesses is the key to getting your own city to go wireless. And it does attract people. In a city of around 10,000 its pretty common to see two or three laptops or palmtops downtown on any given day

Convincing the city not the way to go...

[scooterphish]

As others have already said, focus on the businesses, not the city. Check out The Personal Telco Project [personaltelco.net], started here in Portland,OR:

Personal Telco Project is a Federal tax-exempt 501(c)(3) and an Oregon non-profit organization. We want to facilitate partnerships with local businesses, and in doing so permit the raising of funds though tax-deductible contributions.

100 nodes and growing. One of the coolest things here is that you can hang out in downtown Portland's Pioneer Square [portland.or.us] and surf wirelessly, thanks to local businesses "donating" their wireless bandwidth.

Ah, yes: Wireless. Bad idea loved by all.

[crazyphilman]

The popularity of wireless mystifies me. Although it is riddled with problems, from poor security to unreliability, people love it. Even when they're in their own homes, and all they have to do is run an ethernet cable to have a completely reliable, secure LAN, they STILL go with a wireless solution -- usually at a much higher price (paying for a base station, wireless card, etc).

Before anyone responds to tell me how wonderful wireless is, until you can convincingly make the following issues go away, you won't get anywhere with me:

1. Security: Anyone with a net stumbler can see your network's parameters and possibly use them to play with you. Even if you're using WEP, it'll only be as secure as your implementation. And don't forget, someone can just log all the packets you're sending and try to decrypt them later.

2. Reliability: weather conditions can screw up your wireless signal, as can anything else that causes interference, from electrical equipment to thick walls. Furthermore, someone who doesn't like you can jam your signal fairly easily. Which, by the way, would be a lot of fun if you didn't like your neighbor. Wait for him to look really busy at his computer, and turn on your jammer. Hilarity ensues. Great fun for the jammer, not so fun for the poor sap who loses his net connection right in the middle of a download.

Some will say that with improving encryption, squirt transmissions, better equipment, etc, wireless will improve to the point where the two issues I mentioned will go away. Fine. But this requires more processing to handle the connection, which slows the connection down. And the FCC limits how strong your signal can be.

I just don't see how wireless is ever going to be a good solution. People will continue to use it -- of course. But people still use Windows 98, too.