Free Wi-Fi Threatened? 586
jasonmicron writes "The Houston Chronicle is reporting that if certain state officials have their way, cities in the state of Texas will no longer be able to offer free WiFi to their citizens. This could set a dangerous precedent if passed, as broadband providers could start lobbying officials in the other 49 states to ban free WiFi as well. According to the article, Pennsylvania has already fallen victim to such a law but it excluded Philedelphia due to the city's 'existing efforts.'"
I think (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Government (Score:2, Interesting)
Ahh, it feels good to be a liberal.
anonymous coward lobbyists are out in force here (Score:5, Interesting)
Muni WiFi ALL THE WAY!!
As soon as my metro area goes muni wifi, I am gonna cut off my DSL AND my landline. Buh-Bye Big Telco....
Re:Government (Score:5, Interesting)
PA Governor == Ex-Philly Mayor (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This seems silly (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Government (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not. But if the residents of a city want to share the cost of wireless internet access, why should state legislatures and the telecom industry be allowed to stop them? But even if the law gets passed, there's nothing to stop people from creating non-profit organizations to do the same thing. It would just be a bit more work to get the required funding.
what benefits exist if the government provides wifi networks instead of corporations?
Probably lower costs for the consumers. But, that's only if it stays at the city level. My gut feeling is that doing something like that at the state or federal level would only waste lots of time and money.
who is going to pay for this?
The tax payers, obviously. Or, in the case of a non-profit organization, anyone who wants to help cover the costs. Keep in mind that if money was short, a non-profit org might have to limit access to contributors only, or cap bandwidth for non-contributors.
Luxury, Utility, or Incentive (Score:5, Interesting)
1) WiFi/Net access is a luxury. It is not a basic utility and should not be considered one. The availability of massive quantities of information to the public might be in the general interest, but they can go to a library.
2) Net access is becoming a utility. It is as necessary to the everyday life of the average american as running water and electricity. Remember, we started out without them. At what point does Net Access work that way? We're not quite at that debate yet. We probably won't be there for a while, although maybe it'll be considered if and when somebody establishes a monopoly.
3) Incentive. Are communities providing free wifi to encourage businesses to move in/stay local? This seems the best reason to do it. Although it might be better addressed by providing a tax incentive to businesses to provide indoor coverage than by a government-controlled system that's going to be inefficiently managed. [As a side-note, are these systems going to remain as open as they are after the first few major hacks from such points? What about liability for the Wireless Access provider? Does he have any responsibility to be sure his hardware isn't being used for malicious purposes, or is it like a payphone in the back of your business?]
Mmmm... just a few uninformed thoughts.
Re:Government (Score:5, Interesting)
Then there's the issue of the digital divide. Forget the individuals, let's talk about the communities that aren't cost-effective for the ISPs to run broadband into. If the government doesn't get involved, what are they going to do?
I live in Long Beach, CA. The downtown is covered with free wifi. It's great, but most certainly hurts the cable and telephone companies. Everyone I know who lives around there picks up the wireless from downtown at home. Don't think that these anti-municipal wifi bills weren't preceded by heavy lobbying from Verizon (in Texas) and the cable companies.
Re:I can see 20 access points... (Score:1, Interesting)
Why should cities provide municipal water? It rains, and people can easily collect rainwater and boil it. If they don't think they can get enough rainwater, they can dig wells. Again, problem solved.
And I'll bet you live in an area with lots of people who have Internet access. Try going to a place where many people have trouble paying their power and water bills, and I bet you won't find so many wireless hotspots, either open or secured.
The Reason Being... (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider this... (Score:5, Interesting)
2/ This is a public good. Many hard-core libertarians would disagree with money spent on public goods, and that's really just a matter of philosophy. But given the precedents of public parks (why build public parks when you could have Green Grass Enterprises provide parks and charge the little kids money each time they want to go down a slide?), public libraries (why have libraries when you can be overcharged by Borders?), a military (why have government build and own the nukes that protected us from the USSR and not NukeUSA Inc.?), etc., what is wrong with public Internet? Oh, right, Internet is more lucrative than the park business. Anyway, enough sarcasm. The point is, the precedent is set. Sometimes the line between special interests and genuine public goods can be blurry, but in this case, I'd definitely call it a public good, and by precedent, it should be fine!
3/ A rising tide raises all ships. Sometimes, social engineering is a good thing. Seeing as how much a paradigm the Internet is, getting people access to it can help change the nature of society. By the way, most economists (even conservative ones) consider education and information to be public goods.
What about citizens working together? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What about citizens working together? (Score:5, Interesting)
And /. has already gone down that long road arguing the pros/cons of sharing bandwidth with your neighbors, I know all the arguments, I've done all the precautions, we're not going there for this discussion.
WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's always the bigger players that have the advantage. In this case, it's large phone companies that can write the laws to their benefit. Nobody who is in favor of free wifi is powerful enough to oppose them.
Corporations pull the strings, and government works at their whim.
Re:I can see 20 access points... (Score:2, Interesting)
Where current periodicals, the day's newspapers and recently published books are concerned they are, as the public library is reducing revenues of the sellers. Historical materials is a fair point, but not what I was refering to. When Harry Potter 6 comes out there will probably be a dozen copies at the local library the next day.
But at the same time I'm thinking, "Why aren't the ISPs offering wireless access?" Something's terribly wrong when the government is on the cutting edge of technology.
Because it's in its infancy. Cell phones weren't really too bad back in the 80's and cable TV wasn't so bad in the 70's. Both have become much more expensive. Granted each offer more services and such, but aren't we fighting for a la carte TV, because we're tired of paying $50/mo for 10 channels we want and 60 we don't? Can we get a cap on the primary service, and let those with extra connections/services pay the luxury cost (the way it works with landline phones.)
Ok, don't want to pay taxes, that's peachy. But what if there's a local ballot issue left up to the public to add a use/sales/ or other tax to underwrite such a service, then what? If it passes by a clear majority then would it be right? That's how we approve most of our civic spending changes anyway, but a public measure. Should those who don't want to take part be exempt, until they do?
Is anonymity the issue? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I can see 20 access points... (Score:3, Interesting)
Fred,
My network provides MPLS engineered, 100 Mbps capacity wireless to nine counties in a "flyover" red state. My communities served are as rural as they get. My service runs $20 to $40 per month, and smokes the tired old DSL and cable networks. In most communities, I have between 12% and 33% of households. My competition believes a fractional T1 512 Kbps or 768 Kbps is suffient to serve 100 households with an advertised rate of "1 Mbps download speeds!"
My state government doesn't even know I exist, per their "state of broadband 2004" December report (yes, I've yelled at my lobbyist for not helping these clueless souls understand there's a new market out there they've missed). Granted, when a public utilities commission flunkie only contacts incumbant telephone monopolies and cable TV operators, they're going to miss emerging networks just as a 1990 survey of mainframe computer manufacturers would fail to discover this new fad called the "personal computer."
I've yet to find a government agency that has a clue. When you get into your career after college, you'll discover that the people that are good at what they do get jobs in the commercial sector. This is because they can pay them well for their ability. Those that can't end up in government jobs (please note I'm not including educators in this definition; education is unfortunately the victim of a nationalized market).
If you want your Internet done by someone who failed out of college, believes that telnet is fine for remote administration and SSH too much work, and thinks that traffic engineering is less fun than cutting out at 3 PM and hitting the golf course, then use your own money to buy this inferior service. Please refrain from forcing the rest of us to buy inferior products as we sort of have a clue.
Re:Government (Score:3, Interesting)
If it weren't for public access television, live professional television would be much, much worse. 99% of people who work in television (including me) worked in public access to gain experience before they did it professionally. It takes about three years of productions every week or so to get good enough to be a professional sports cameraman.
Imagine, if you will, the entry level position in your business being eliminated and the next level up becoming the entry level. That's what would happen to professional television if public access were eliminated.
Re:I can see 20 access points... (Score:3, Interesting)
Phat_Tony, you nailed something that other slashdotters need to pick up on. There is no free market for telecom in the US, but do you know why?
Telecom is a highly inelastic demand product [netmba.com]. Raise telephone rates $2 and people still have to have their phone. You wanna go without one? Fires, break ins, etc. are a bitch when you can't call 911. Take a basic micro econ class in college and you'll discover that telecom is an extremely interesting target of taxation authorities because of its inelastic demand (if you have a family member in government dealing with taxation, ask them and they'll confirm. Inelastic products are the primary target of taxation efforts).
Lessig is a nice guy, but a useful fool in this case. He suffers from hanging out with too many government officials and seeks to be liked by them all. I guess we all face this decision of "being liked or being right."
For those of you playing along at home, study Iowa Telecom. In the financial world, they're not much more than a penny stock play ([per Boardwatch, their valuation methodology is smoke and mirrors). Yet they were able to get the Iowa Public Utilities Commission to permit a $3.50 per month per subscriber cross-subsidy from their monopoly service to their competitive one. What all this techno-jargon means is that by promising government officials more tax money, they got to break a basic rule of monopolies: thou shalt not steal from the monopoly pot and put the money into the competitive business pot.
A good example of why this is bad is as follows: I've got the monopoly on electrical service in your town. You own a grocery store. I decide groceries are interesting and start my own. Since I don't have a clue, my expenses are higher than yours. So instead of competing, I get the town mayor to allow me to apply a $10.00 per month fee on electrical service as a "grocery subsidy" - meaning all 50,000 people in town get to give me $10 bucks which I give to my grocery business. Now I've got a half million dollars a month being stolen from anybody that has to have electrical service and given to my failing grocery business. Do you want to compete with me? Best of all, if you refuse to subsidize me, I shut your power off. I get to take $10 from the grocery owner each month to crush his business. It's the modern equivalent of Mongols raping the wives and killing the children.
The mayor lets me do this because I let him collect a fee on top of this. This pays for his pet project, the new community swimming pool, which he's convinced will ensure his reelection. Even if I eventually fail, I've ruined your grocery business and poisoned the market sufficiently so that nobody will ever compete with me.
Boys and girls, it's all about power and stealing your money. I got my wakeup call in 1995 dealing with gambling industry elites who were "giving free Internet to little towns." There's never, ever a free lunch. You have no idea the price you're going to pay. Often, your soul is not enough.
If you believe for a second it's about being nice to you and giving you free Internet, you're the biggest sucker out there. Government and big business is a serious sport. Wake up and look at who's putting the money behind the efforts you're idealistically supporting.
Re:This seems silly (Score:2, Interesting)
Before 1971, if you were a male U.S. citizen between 18 and 21, not only couldn't you drink, you couldn't vote. But you did stand a good chance of being drafted for service in Vietnam.
They eliminated the double-standard by lowering the voting age to 18. Some states, like Massachusetts also lowered the drinking age to 18. Of course, after the draft was repealed, so was the draft.
Re:I can see 20 access points... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, because we all know that private companies are always the greatest for competence and customer service. In fact, the last three ISP's I've dealt with...
Wait...had morons who wouldn't know a processor from a hard smack across the forehead. And when I've worked on government accounts to service datacenter UPS's, the admins there are generally smarter and better then the equivalent corporate ones.
As to "forcing" you to buy something? Parent indicated a CITIZEN REFERENDUM OR INITIATIVE putting the taxes for this service to a popular vote. If people don't want it, it'll fail overwhelmingly and no one will be "forced" into anything. And if it passes, and the government service sucks as badly as you think it will, private companies will come along and offer better service and make tons of money. Of course, if the government service is as good as promised, problem solved.
You so-called "lovers of the free market" are the ones who tell us that it's OUR problem to figure out how to get health insurance when it's prohibitively expensive, and OUR problem to get a job. Well great, fine. Then it's the CORPORATION'S problem to figure out how to break into a government's market area, and if they can't, well, there's the free market, and some have an advantage where some don't!
Stereotypes and joking aside, not all government employees are idiots, and CERTAINLY not all corporate employees have two braincells to clack together.
And before you start in-I'm a private sector employee myself.
A good resource (Score:3, Interesting)
This topic was covered on PBS' NOW program last weekend.
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcriptNOW108 _full.html [pbs.org]
Short version: Corporations are trying to pass laws restricting what duly-elected officials can do (viz, starting up wireless public networks), EVEN AFTER they have refused invitations to provide the service. (There's a story in the program about a small town that no company would serve, despite being asked, and how the town council did it themselves... and then the telecoms went to the statehouse to try and make what the council did illegal. Interesting.)
Re:I don't think so (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah right, tell me another one. You obviously don't pay a cable or satellite TV bill every month for a basic package. In case you haven't noticed they are routinely jacking up rates faster than inflation [broadcastengineering.com] by a substantial amount, and the quality of the channels and programming they provide is either staying the same or getting worse. They claim they add more channel but neglect to point out most of the channels they add are garbage.
Since 1996 when rates were deregulated they've gone up 50%, three times inflation, 150 channels and there is still nothing on worth watching most of the time.
OK so you are paying maybe $40 a month for this fine service. We are talking basic cable. Pretty much every channel you get on basic is laden with commercials so you get to pay twice, both for the service and you still have to watch programs laden with ads.
Ever watch TV late in the evening or early morning. Nearly every channel is running infomericals all night not to mention most packages carry a half dozen shopping channels which are basicly infomercials 24x7.
You want efficient cable/satellite then make them sell you each channel individually and if you don't want 3/4 of the channels they provide you pay 1/4 of the price you do now. John McCain [broadcastengineering.com] among others have tried to push this in congress and the TV/Satellite companies kill it in short order.
"but since it's in taxes, you never actually know this"
Bah again. Any city worth a plug nickel will have the costs of the service broken out in black and white in its budget. Wouldn't take much more for them to provide usage statistics on numbers of users and bandwidth used.
"And, things will never get better, since commercial providers can't compete against "free". Everyone loses."
Well actually no. The only losers are private companies that want to rake in a lot of money on internet service. Internet access IS a lot more like essential infrastructure today. Any kid in school needs it for research and if they don't have it at home they are forced to libraries or to do without. Most cities do provide internet service through libraries at taxpayer expense already, you are just saving people from having to go to the library and queue up to get it, assuming you can swing a second hand computer.
If you make each household pay monthly the affluent get it, the poor don't and you just reinforce the digital divide. If it is done through taxes everyone has equal access.
Wireless access points are cheap, there is so much dark fiber sitting around bandwidth is also cheap. Its key you don't have to run something in to every home. Just setup evenly spaced access points. It is totally rationale and efficient for cities to provide this as a public service.
Cable and DSL will never be able to compete against wireless, free or not, so they have a lot to fear. They have to run copper or fiber in to every home, send crews around to hook, unhook and repair every home. They have to spend a small fortune mailing out bills, cashing checks and dealing with deadbeats. The can't beat public wireless on efficiency, how its paid for.
Re:I can see 20 access points... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This seems silly (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Government (Score:2, Interesting)
These sort of contracts consolidate big companies and don't effectively discourage poor service. They rarely benefit local companies unless they are franchised or otherwise tied into the major players.
(You can also guarantee that mobocracy will rule - assumed MS PC and IE usage).
Re:I can see 20 access points... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it is not. They should invite and encourage companies to do it, but can not do it themselves. Yours is a seductive line of thinking, but it is wrong. Cities are not going to force people to work on this -- they plan to pay them with taxpayers' money. And if there are enough people in a city to operate a service (any service), they should be doing it as a business and be paid directly by their users. This is how this country operates and is the most efficient way known today.
You don't want the city council to decide, which sites ought to blocked and how much bandwidth each citizen ought to be limited to. And the people, who'll never use this service wouldn't want to pay for it. And I -- as I drive through your city -- don't want the city's cop looking through my laptop: "I'm sorry, sir, but we had some heavy network abuse recently and are checking everybody's equipment now."
The wait is the result of the government's earlier "initiatives" of offering telcos and cable companies monopolies over certain areas. Bodies of various would-be broadband providers are covering the battlefields of their wars with government-created incumbents (Verizon, Comcast).
The solution is not more of the same... You had to "wait for years" and decided to do it yourself. Great! Just don't do it inside a government.
SpeakEasy, for example, allows, nay, encourages you to share your Internet connection (wirelessly or otherwise). They'll even do the billing for you (you specify the rate starting at $5 per month). You may not be able to get DSL in a small city, but you can get a T1 and share it with neighbors. And if you think, that will be expensive, know, that paying for it with taxes would cost more and get you less.
Re:I can see 20 access points... (Score:2, Interesting)
I work for a municpal government in Florida, and our city set up a for-profit gas company that is wholely owned and operated by the city government. The company is only subsized by taxpayer money in a very minimal fashion, and operates primarily based on its own profits. Our city council is OK with this due to the simple fact that no other company is locally offering gas power to our area, and the infrastructure to support this service is easily placed simultaneously with water/sewer/drainage/etc. The city pays far less to implement this service than a private company would, and as such is able to make a profit in doing so.
There is a demand for this service by citizens who want a cheap alternative to the rather expensive corporate electric company that blankets this area, and since no other private enterprise is interested in taking on the expense in setting this up, the city is doing it. The Gas company we run is indirectly competing with the private corporate electric company in the area, but technically, it's a different service.
I see free Wi-Fi as a similar situation. True, there are corporate broadband companies (cable/DSL) in the area with which we would be indirectly competing if we implemented city-wide Wi-Fi, but since it's technically a different service, we could get by with it. The same cost breaks in setting up the infrastructure would hold true in this situation (municipalities normally get breaks on hardware/fiber).
The voters would have to approve of this kind of situation (as they did with the Gas company), but if it's a service they demand, then our responsibility is to provide it to them, assuming we are not interfering with private enterprise in doing so.