Why Municipal Wi-Fi Networks have Been Such a Flop 236
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.
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...
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.
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Also, the signals bounce off of metal sheets just like a mirror.
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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.
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But to tell most people that they need to purchase additional equipment; they balk at that.
People always do that. For example, a cable company advertises service for $50 a month, then tells you that you will need to spend $60 (once) for a cable modem. Or a satellite company offers TV service for $50 per month, but requires you to spend $150 or more for the satellite equipment. Of course you will need certain equipment. for example, you can't use cable or satellite unless you have a TV, and you can't use the internet unless you have a computer.
Personally, I prefer to buy my own equipment t
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>>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?
Re:Long story short: (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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*sigh* yes, but the electrical distribution network ("national grid" in the UK) was set up with substantial government funding
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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.
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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
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I don't see why two cities with population X are more productive then one city with population 2*X. In fact, economies of scale imply the opposit
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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.
While you may be right that encouraging urban sprawl should be avoided, you're proposing that private industry can just bui
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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
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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
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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
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No, it does not. Or, rather, it should not have. This is an age-old argument, really. The government's role should be limited to foreign policy (diplomacy and military) and upholding the law.
The examples of electricity and phone service are not really examples. Government's involvement makes those services worse, than they ought to be — the protected mon
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I wouldn't go that far, pollution control and paying for education is still important. Externalities do exist, even if they are rare.
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No. Government's role should be to benefit its citizens. And the most glaring omission from the above statement is that it is also the government/parliament's duty to write the law, which leads to a much larger set of responsibilities - for example, consumer protection.
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]
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Because on socialist slashdot (Score:2)
Seriously, it seems like the majority of the basement dwellers here never met a tax-payer funded boondoggle they didn't support. It's hard to tell if that's related to age and income, or just a general inability to understand that every government project has negative unintended consequences all out of proportion to what it as to accomplish...
I'm sure we all want Internet access from an ISP with the efficiency of the DMV, the customer service of the IRS, and the privacy policies of the
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It wasn't worth it at all.
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As opposed to private sector projects, which always accomplish exactly what they set out to do without any problems or failures. Such as all the WiFi networks TFA mentions are collapsing in mid-construction. And the interesting thing is that they're collapsing specifically because they're private projects. If there's not enough profit coming in, they're gone faster than you can blink.
It's t
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For starters, municipal wi-fi is not a rural subsidy. Rural broadband is, but that would seem to be built into the existing Universal Service Fund. An interesting question is exactly what the big Telcos did with the money that was supposed to get broadband out to the boondocks. Some small phone companies seem to have gotten the money and used it to roll out broadband. Why do Waitsfield Telecom customers
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My general point is that I am opposed to rural subsidies of any kind.
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I prefer to pay my farmers in money, not welfare bullshit.
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For one we are talking about municipal WiFi. Just about every city mentioned where it has failed was just that a city.
I think municipal WiFi is a huge waste of money. The cost of blanketing a city with WiFi is very high and the benefits are tiny. Small hot spots will give 90+% of the benefits with probably 5% of the cost.
Now for rural areas. Heck yea there needs to be something done about broadband access. We have paying subsides to the carriers for year to "wire"
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Yes, your right. Neither of them was very important. The areas that already had power before the new deal still provide the vast majority of economic output today.
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Most of the Aluminum that went into the War effort was made with electricity from TVA dams. Most of the food produced was from farms that had electric power thanks to rural electrification.
You just looking at "Economic output" in isolation without looking at the support infrastructure that those cities require to produce that output like raw materials.
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.
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>power. It's not one of those "must have" things, it's one of those "why should I have to pay for it" things.
Errr...
As a politician it's harder to sell WiFi because there are many companies that already provide that service, and the infrastructure costs are not as high as something like Sewer/Water/Elec/Cable TV/Telephone.
Also.. they were looking at doing WiFi here.. the biggest problem? w
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.
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Hey man, I grew up around small boats and live in Vermont. I understand living off the grid. But, I think that I can safely say that few Americans are prepared to live with wood stoves, minimal refrigeration, and no air conditioning. In fact, living off the grid is a way of life, not a minor inconvenience. I think that most Americans are going to be pulling 20 KwHr or more per day off the grid.
You can generate your own electricity to get
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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.
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Oulu, Finland, panoulu network (Score:3, Interesting)
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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.
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The wi-fi has already had unforseen benefits as the new wi-fi was used during the rescue effort [computerworld.com] after the Interstate 35W bridge collapse.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Rule #1: It has to work (Score:2)
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That's interesting. I lived many years in the area, and I't think that Santa Monica would be a near perfect candidate for municipal wi-fi. Densly populated by US standards -- around 10,000 people per square mile. Mostly flat, very few natural coverage holes except along the beach front. Highly educated, high income.
If municipal wi-fi doesn't work well there, it's probably going to have the same problems or worse in othe
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.
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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
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No collapsing bridges in Europe?
Really? [wikipedia.org]
Portugal, 2001
Moscow, 2000
Spain, 2005
Germany, 1998 (train derail, overpass collapses)
etc, etc.
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Germany, 1988 'error in construction'
Austria, 1976 'Concrete of the column had never been examined, was internally totally destroyed'
Bridges break. Human construction, on either side of the pond, is not infallible.
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The Slate article seems to imply that widespread broadband isn't happening. But it is-- coverage is growing at a nice clip and while we do have the problem of only at best two major players in each market (telephone and cable providers) this is a young industry and that's to be expected. I'm trying to understand exactly what the Slate guy is asking for from a customer experience perspective. From the article:
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What are you talking about?
NASA, USPS, Hoover Dam and lots of governmental successes exist.
Private developers are selfish hogs who would think of nothing but to rip you off $25 for a 56 Kbps line.
Government atleast is elected and the sheriff and local country knows that if they screw up a major road-laying or bridge laying, they can say goodbye to their golf clubs.
Yes larger projects like FAA get screwed up, but middle and smaller ones succeed where private would not eve
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I generally got the impression that the reason why municipal wi-fi doesn't work is largely because it's a solution in search of a problem. When we really know what problem we're trying to solve, then we can put something in place.
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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.
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)
it doesn't work (Score:2)
Why muni WiFi *should* fail (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're right. It's much safer to have your Internet connection controlled by an amoral multinational corporation. You realize, of course, that the telecoms are lobbying to have themselves granted immunity [msn.com] for illegal wiretaps they facilitated on behalf of the Bush administration?
Mayors and governors, in a functioning democracy at least, are accountable to
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!
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Despite admitting alcohol abuse and an affair with a subordinate, Gavin Newsom is a shoe-in to win the next election. He doesn't really need to suck up to the corporate money. I think it's just instinctive for him to do so.
That's only the tip of the iceberg.... (Score:2)
What you'll find then is that the general population is bunch of selfish, bandwidth-hogging pigs. Everybody and his dog will be using it for P2P file copying.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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The biggest problem with Wi-Fi is that you need way too many transceivers to make it work on a municipal scale, and that adds up to costly problem of the the excess complexity of controlling and maintaining a large number of transceiver spots.
WiMAX--which is about to go to large-scale applications within the next 18 months--needs only a few transceiver towers to cover an entire city. That right there saves a lot of money since you only need to maintain and control a few transceive
Exactly! (Score:2)
College campuses have it much easier for lots of reasons: existing campus LAN, existing campus IT, dense population, probably not 100% coverage (how many campuses have wifi in open spaces like parking lots and sports fields?
wisp coops are the way to go (Score:5, Informative)
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Here we have one- its a scam (Score:2)
I tried using the free Metro service. It was hard to connect and attachments could be no more than 1mb. And I live very close an access point.
Ed
Porland, OR
Lawrence Freenet (Score:2)
The Last Kilometer? (Score:2)
The author throws this out to explain why the "last-mile problem" is such a big deal. Then he goes on to talk about "sunk costs" and other economic explanations for the dominance of a few large, technologically backwards local providers. But he never really explains why the US lags. Is it because other countries are metric, and the kilometer is shorter than the mile?
(D
Let the market innovate (Score:2)
The ONLY viable way, and the BEST way is to sit on it, until technology has caught up to the point where private enterprises can outcompete the telcos. It's natural, but more importantly, it's INEV
Municipal Wi Fi shouldn't be about that last mile. (Score:2)
This is what T-Mobile and Sprint and the rest are cherrypicking, setting up expens
power consumption (Score:2)
Does anyone know how much power a Wi-Fi network consumes vs a wired one? I realize that's a difficult comparison to make, but can anyone point me to some data on that topic?