San Fran Mayor Declares Wireless for All

arvind s. grover writes "San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom stated yesterday in his state of the city address that every San Francisco resident will have free wireless internet access. They don't seem to have much set up yet, and no proposal was laid out for the installation of access points in every nook and cranny of the city. I wonder what vendor is going to get that contract...You might be better off finding a wireless node using NodeDB or this oddly-titled site: cheesebikini."

WiGLE!

[SuperQ]

of course, the BEST place to find AP's is WiGLE.net, the database has listings for 1,847,784 APs.

Another site listing Wi-Fi is WiFiMaps.com

[drewzhrodague]

Another site listing Wi-Fi is WiFiMaps.com [wifimaps.com]. This covers mainly the US, and data is updated by our users who upload their wardriving scans.

Just like Berkeley.

[Kenja]

I'm going to file this under the same heading as the "sunshine for the masses" law that Berkeley has on the books. Living in the bay area is a strange experiance indeed.

Re:How...?

[geg81]

The median income is so high because there are so many people here with so much money.

If the median is $74000, it makes no difference whether the people above the median all make $75000 or $7.5m, the median will be unaffected.

Re:How...?

[geg81]

And how many people who live in the city of San Francisco cannot afford a computer? The median income is $74,000 per year.

That's probably because the median income only counts those who are actually employed. But San Francisco has a large population of unemployed, illegals, and/or homeless. Those people could be helped quite a bit by widespread and cheap Internet access.

Note that in those statistics median household income is only slightly above the national median, while the median income (i.e., the income of those employed) is considerably higher.

Re:How...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Newsom was elected on a platform of cutting cash benefits and actually enforcing the panhanding laws. (Most of the "homeless" bugging the tourists aren't really represenative of the population.)

Re:How...?

[gcaseye6677]

This article [commonsensewonder.com] may show some insight into the reasons why there were so many homeless people in the first place in S.F. and why the numbers might be going down soon. I couldn't believe the city gives cash handouts to the homeless. The money they give out is not enough to rent even the cheapest housing in the San Francisco area, but it is enough to fuel one hell of a drug binge, which regularly kills [kron4.com] many homeless people every year. Cash assistance for the homeless was seen as a good idea for understandable reasons, but now that the negative effects from it are clear, the 'progressive' thing to do would be to stop the cash handouts and use the money to provide actual services to get people off the street.

Re:Good idea...but...

[superdude72]

And when I say "help the homeless", I mean REALLY help them, like get them a place to live and a way to make a buck, not just handouts, which they've done in the past.

Newsom's campaign emphasized this issue. I'm not sure I agree with his approach, but suffice it to say he is not ignoring the homeless problem in order to implement free wireless. There is a measure on the city ballot to increase the sales tax and give all of the increase to social services. It will probably pass.

The thing is, homelessness is an enormously expensive problem to solve, probably beyond the means of any individual city. Cities that "solve" their problems with homelessness do so by shifting the burden to other cities--it's not like anyone checks your passport when you take BART in from Concord. There is nothing to stop Concord from cutting its social services budget to nothing, so those people are forced to go to San Francisco for their methadone. This is what has happened all over America. And why not? If you can get rid of your drug addicts and homeless by CUTTING the social services budget, why not do so? Nobody wants these people in their neighborhood. We need to stop shifting this problem around and solve it on a national level. Unfortunately, it's hard to muster the political will. When suburban people see that their communities have no homeless, they assume the problem has been solved, and it hasn't.

Wireless access, on the other hand, is relatively cheap, and can be done with or without national cooperation, so it doesn't make sense to put this on hold until we solve the problem of homelessness. It isn't merely a lack of $2-3 million that is at the root of the problem--if that were the case, a rich, liberal city like San Francisco would have solved it a long time ago.

Re:How...?

[Master of Transhuman]

The San Francisco public library already has umpteen computers with Internet access as well as plug-in access for laptops. One can sign-up for hour or half-hour access - although the wait is long as many people use this service.