From "Happy Hacking" to "Screw You" 243
tquid writes "Trying to bridge the digital divide in Canada's poorest postal code, a principled group of hackers adopt "open source"-based technology spun off from an MIT project. Then the terms on the hardware are changed, and changed again, and then firmware to lock out the frustrated group's software is installed, screwing them out of their investment and many hours of development work."
Anyone know the details of the MIT agreement? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Anyone know the details of the MIT agreement? (Score:5, Funny)
It is a permissive license, meaning that it permits reuse within proprietary software ... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Anyone know the details of the MIT agreement? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the really sleezy part--changing your licensing terms for new sales is annoying for loyal customers, but obviously can't apply retroactively to goods you've already sold. But this company is doing just that--trying to retroactively impose their new licensing and payment model onto units that were already sold under an open, permissive terms.
So even though they still have the free code, they are now blocked from loading the code onto their own purchased hardware. It's probably not impossible--a talented hacker can maybe bypass the firmware and load custom code again... but of course they shouldn't have to. It seems to me that Meraki has more or less broken into customer devices without permission and made unrequested changes--rather illegal as far as I know.
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Re:Anyone know the details of the MIT agreement? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, my post is an implicit suggestion to read more, which is the best help there is. The only real way to help your spelling is to read books. I read one or two books a month on a slow month, sometimes a couple a week, including literature, science, math, politics, and plenty of fun stuff too, despite the fact that I spend time at places like
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I claim bullshit on this. That was Juan Ramón Jimenez's dream (1956 literature Nobel Prize), but we are not quite there.
While it's true you know for certain how to pronounce a word as soon as you see it written down, the reverse it's not: you can't always know how to write a word you heared (as it was the point from the previous poster): 'baca' and 'vaca' sound exactly the same as would do 'hueso' and 'ueso' (if the latter existed, which is not). Yo
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Part of the problem is that the company (Meraki) pushed firmware upgrades to all the units, including older boxes purchased before their revised licensing model. The new firmware locks down the units, making it impossible to hack them and impossible to load custom firmware and bypass the new locks.
I strongly oppose network equipment that updates itself without giving me the choice of averting that. It's the equivalent of closed source software, only in hardware. Business plans change, and you never know
Re:Anyone know the details of the MIT agreement? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Anyone know the details of the MIT agreement? (Score:5, Informative)
So talk to them? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So talk to them? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So talk to them? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to have a "rewarding" conversation with an IP lawyer, you need to figure out which bucket they are in so you can understand the motivation behind their selected language. If you assume "logic", or "reason" are involved you may as well just bang your head against the wall.
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Re:So talk to them? (Score:4, Informative)
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So... Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke and move on to a different platform.
Re:So talk to them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because (a) now we all know* to watch out for Meraki, and (2) Meraki might be more willing to fix a public stink than a private complaint.
*(and knowing is half the battle. GI J... oh wait. sorry.)
Just talk to them.. Right. That'll work. NOT! (Score:2)
They'll ask "why should we let you?" And they'll be (from their POV) right. Why SHOULD they let them. They're not making money off it. They don't give a shit.
If you want to use their hardware at all, you have to give (and keep giving) them money. Either directly in payments, or indirectly by serving adds on their free tier.
Fuck that noise.
Illegal? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Informative)
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Article text (Score:5, Informative)
I've been following the development of mesh wifi technology for several years now. From the moment I first grokked what was going on with it, it struck me as a great disruptive technology. One of the most successful early projects, and one that I followed with a great deal of interest was MIT's Roofnet project [mit.edu] - an implementation of commodity hardware and open source software, built on Linux, which provides wifi coverage for MIT's campus.
In 2006 a spin-off company named Meraki [wikipedia.org] was formed to develop and commercialize the MIT Roofnet technology. At the time I was on the board of the Vancouver Community Network [vcn.bc.ca] and had been championing more development of wireless technology. We immediately ordered 9 of the first beta units to try out. The technology was cheap ($50/unit) and it worked but what prevented us from going any further with it was the pricing model that they decided to adopt - $5/node/month for access to the "dashboard" - the real-time monitoring software that they were developing for managing the networks. We decided that this cost was prohibitive for our purposes and the Merakis were shelved.
In September of 2007 I heard about a group of Vancouver community wifi enthusiasts who were getting together with the goal of setting up community wifi in Canada's poorest neighbourhood. I came out to a meeting and invited along some people whom I know are interested in any project that is about bridging the digital divide. The technology that was trumpeted at that meeting was Meraki. Since my previous brush with them they had changed their pricing structure and now they would let you run a free network (with free access to their dashboard) or a subscription (paid) network for 10% of your charges. We (the group, which came to call itself " FreeTheNet [freethenet.ca]") were unanimous that the free option was what we wanted to do and we quickly began building out a public network.
In October Meraki announced that they were changing their pricing model (yet again) and that they would be vastly raising the costs of their hardware (tripling, in fact). I remember going to their website to learn more about what they were doing and their new marketing slogan was something like "Build your business using exciting new technology where the rules of the game keep changing " How ironic; I wish I'd kept a screenshot of that! Under their new system there was no way that we could build out the network we envisioned. At roughly that point, one of our most experienced hackers said "forget Meraki", we're going to write our own firmware and dashboard and promptly started researching that. By late Novermber he was able to demostrate an open routing firmware called B.A.T.M.A.N. [wikipedia.org] running with a mesh helper inside called Robin [blogin.it], that provided the same functionality as the Meraki firmware. This could be installed in the commodity Meraki hardware which greeted you with a friendly and encouraging "happy hacking" when you logged into it via the console.
Over December and January he worked on adding features that we wanted to our network to have (and that we had previously been encouraging Meraki to build to improve their system - things like per node custom splash screen, enhancements to the dashboard to improve scalability, etc.) All of this was being tested on Meraki hardware because this is what we had spent our money on back when they supported and encouraged the kind of work we were doing.
Then in February Meraki announced a change to their EULA (End User Licence Agreement) which precluded anyone from changing any of the software that they install on t
Re:I don't think they are viable (Score:5, Insightful)
Who would walk a client into that sort of scenario? How many bright hopeful startups have we seen disappear without a mention? It's not like they would ever be honest and tell you they are running low on cash.
I wouldn't mind if their service was value added, billing or accounting or something, but the network could still be used in the event they vanished. If the hardware was open and I could install a Open Source version later, I might have done it.
Maybe Meraki needs to revisit their model and look at it from a customer's viewpoint.
Re:I don't think they are viable (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is what I thought. Although the author of the article mentioned that they couldn't find an alternative, I would certainly be curious to see if anyone can provide a working alternative, commercial or otherwise. I am sure while 'Meraki' might be larger arse-holes than g**tse.cx, I am sure they would change their approach if there was good competition.
Speechless (Score:2)
A little one-sided there, methinks. After all, the money you would have given them would still work just fine. This business deserves to fail in the marketplace.
You didn't disable the auto-update? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Let everyone know (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like lawyer time (Score:5, Insightful)
EULA doesn't apply (Score:2, Interesting)
I used to work a couple blocks from there (Score:5, Informative)
I found the contrast between most of Vancouver, which is otherwise one of Canada's most prosperous cities, and the Downtown Eastside so stark as to be completely overwhelming. There was a time when I had been one of the urban unfortunates myself, as I have a mental illness that was at one time quite severe.
I became determined to help those that I could, often buying meals for those who asked me for spare change. But it got to be more than I could bear; the stress of it put me back in the mental hospital - I was brought to St. Paul's hospital on Burrard by an ambulance, where I stayed for three weeks in their Two-South Mental Health ward.
I discuss Vancouver, and many of those who I met there, in my weblog The Vancouver Diaries [vancouverdiaries.com]. That is, the entries before June 30th, 2007, when I moved back to the US. I kept blogging at the site, as I intend to go back someday, but for now I live in Silicon Valley.
I have to say, that the company that remotely installed this firmware, breaking their project, why they have to be worse than The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I don't think I have in my entire life met so many people who are so unfortunate as the residents of the Downtown Eastside. I hope they have a change of heart.
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I used to work a couple blocks from there, too. (Score:2)
I never know such places existed in Canada, but there are bad neighborhoods everywhere I guess. Still, I've seen a lot worse in the U.S. I used to live near East St. Louis, and that place was more like a shelled-out DMZ than a town.
One of the reasons the Downtown Eastside is the poorest neighbourhood in Canada and has tens of thousands of junkies is climate: one can survive most weather most of the year. Another is its status as Terminal City (no pun, really), since if you keep going west (or south) you wind up there. It's a regional sink, for British Columbia (and the prairies too), a vast vast area.
The sudden surge in crystal meth use (speed, to you old timers) across the country contributes hugely to the problem. Recently I was
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Eight Thousand Used Syringes Littered The Ground (Score:2)
I was considering Meraki... (Score:5, Interesting)
Please forgive my English, it's Monday.
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So, I guess I'm not doing much more than offering
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Your best bet may be a Linksys WRT54GL [openwrt.org].
Re:I was considering Meraki... (Score:5, Informative)
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Open-Mesh: The Open Source Meraki Alternative (Score:5, Informative)
ROBIN [blogin.it] is an open source mesh firmware that can run on reflashed Meraki nodes (well, I don't think it's "allowed" by Meraki anymore, since they've changed their license agreement to forbid 3rd party firmware and have made it really difficult to access the bootloader).
Open-Mesh [open-mesh.com] is the dashboard management service that ROBIN nodes are configured to use. The guy who develops this actually started working on this dashboard when Meraki was still Roofnet - compare the Open-Mesh dashboard to the Meraki dashboard, the similarity is obvious. Also, you can buy pre-flashed, fully featured ROBIN nodes from Open-Mesh.com for $50 each, the same price that Meraki sells their crippled "standard version" of their nodes.
OrangeMesh, is an open-source version of the dashboard being developed that will allow you to host your own dashboard server, completely freeing you from reliance on any third party. You can check out it's progress here. [googlecode.com]
This might be the worst... (Score:3, Insightful)
summary I have seen on /. to date!"
I guess our beloved Cmd Taco has bever heard of the basic Who, What, Where, When of writing an article.
Here's a company that has done it right (Score:2)
I call shenanigans! (Score:4, Informative)
Meraki patched a not-for-profit group's hardware from remote without permission so that it would no longer run the firmware same not-for-profit developed in-house. They did this to hardware that was BSD licensed when purchased. They either employed a backdoor or abused known customer access credentials (likely the former) to do it.
This is probably illegal and certainly wrong.
(TFA doesn't say if a contract was in play between Meraki and the client that would have authorized them to apply the patches, but its clear that the customer had put an end to the agreement so a complaint against Meraki would be legit.)
At the very least, this is a malicious hack against a customer. But I think its more than that.
If the peeps in Vancouver were left to continue their work, they certainly would have had a "competitive" solution which they would likely have offered up online for all to use. This would effectively make them a competitor, and a dangerous one because unhappy Meraki customers would be the most likely to check it out. I would go so far to say that this was a pre-emptive sabotage (with poor Vancouverites in the crossfire).
I have no problem with Meraki adapting their business model to find something that works. But their actions way overstepped the boundaries of the law. They would have been wiser to handle the whole affair in a more benevolent fashion in the first place. They could have, for example, cut a partnership deal with the non-profit to allow them to participate in feature development under NDA and enjoy a subsidized service. Both parties would have come out winners.
Whenever financiers get involved, they always want to lock up the tech because it is the only tangible asset they can claim ownership of. Meanwhile, they miss the essence of business value, which is in the people and the partnerships and the innovation.
I think that the only way community wifi is going to work is if it is community-run, not-for-profit, and vendor independent. There is no question that we will have this soon enough and it will be running on top of WRTs and other similar APs which are abundant and cheap and have loads of after-market conversion options for outdoor use. I'm disappointed to read all these comments bashing the Vancouver hackers, who deserve kudos for their inventiveness, determination, and good will.
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There, I emphasized that, because I think it's the most important part. Whoever runs the operation, there is always a chance that they will turn against you. Not being dependent on them lowers the chance that they will and leaves you free to find an alternative if they still do. Vendor-independence is a Good Thing everywhere, not just for community wifi.
Reflashing Merakis (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you can still easily make them revert to an earlier version which can be reflashed.
As described here:
http://robin.forumup.it/about99-15-robin.html [forumup.it]
"you can ssh into the Meraki and create edit the
Code:
echo "firmware.mips.version 6-9163" >
And they'll update themselves to an earlier version.
The founders of Meraki have made huge contributions to open source software and it is good to see that others are taking advantage of their great work and making further improvements.
Automatic Updates (Score:2, Insightful)
FTA and the linked blog, it appears the firmware update was pushed by the manufacturer, therefore didn't have to happen. I'm not blaming the people affected here as in principle, you may want to receive security updates etc. as a matter of course.
But personally I'm finding more and more that 'updates' often regress the performance of a product due to unnecessary flash new features and political modifications you'd neve
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(Hey, someone had to post it.
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
The hackers did show a lack of savvy. They were trying to help people who have no means to pay, and they put themselves in a position where they were relying on a for-profit corporation to achieve their goals. That's just stupid. Make deals with the devil, end up on fire. They should have known better than to leave themselves vulnerable to external leverage like that.
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If you just take a for-profit's product and retool it, then don't be upset if they discontinue the model and leave you stuck - they aren't under any obligation to sell it forever.
On the other hand, writing up a contract between an open-source and for-profit organization where each benefits and has defined responsibilities should be safe. Perhaps the open-source develops the design/code, and the for-profit can m
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
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Markets with rational actors may function perfectly, but markets rarely provide everyone with sufficient infor
Sounds like the first death throe (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not necessarily stupid; it depends on whether selling the unit at below costs makes it attractive for your customers to do other, more profitable business.
Consider the proverbial "razor/razor blade" business. You sell the razors at a loss, but you make it up by selling your customers a pack of blades every few months for years. Now if those blades, tear bloody furrows in your customers' faces, then ha
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
If some company screws up and sells my "faulty" goods, then how is this any of my responsibility. And how does this allow them to go in and change the goods they already sold me?
I am having great difficulty understanding your logic on this one.
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Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
What a company hopes for and the reality of what they get is not my problem or concern. They are from fricking MIT. If they can't do a simple business analysis to come up with a workable pricing and support model, then what the hell are they doing staying in business. This is elementary level thinking, so no, the eggheads from MIT get no sympathy from me.
G
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Fond memories of the CueCat come to mind
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a vendor lock in attempt. Try to sell the original part cheaply to win a customer, then milk the customer when he got the item and needs "fuel" to keep it running. Whenever something like this happens, you see a company get all defensive and try their utmost to keep their business model working.
This of course raises the question, why don't they just raise the price to match the cost? You offered that question yourself, why didn't they just raise the price by 70 bucks to make a profit with the original piece of hardware? The answer is simple: There's more money in milking locked in customers.
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:4, Informative)
Except that this isn't what TFA describes. The company sold a product, and then quietly sabotaged their customers' purchased products. This is something very different from trying to "milk" customers for some consumable "fuel". They intentionally damaged the equipment so it couldn't be used in the way it was advertised and the customer was using it.
To use the wornout auto analogy, it's more like your auto dealer sent people around to your house in the middle of the night to sabotage your car, in an attempt to increase your repair bills or persuade you to do a trade-in. Except that in this case, the saboteurs were all too clearly in the pay of the company that sold you the goods.
I do wonder if this is legal in Canada or BC. You'd think that there'd be some laws that would cover such sabotage. With all the laws on the books, was this sort of crime somehow missed?
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"His girlfriend gave up her toe! She though we'd be getting million dollars! Iss not fair!"
Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
And? Your point?
If they unwisely chose to sell them at a loss - TFB. They have every right to change the terms and price on new units, but IMO they have committed an outright crime (computer trespass, at the very least) by forcing new firmware on already-purchased units.
but these hackers come along and provide the service for free on the same hardware.
Any company that hasn't learned that lesson yet, deserves their fate. If your business model critically depends on something that a third party can provide cheaper (or free), your customers will use the cheaper version.
They showed a clear lack of political savvy
Riiiight - Because we engineers normally have legendary people-skills and political-prowess?
Meraki presented a problem to people who live for solving them. Politics? Gimme a break. If you add non-game rules to the puzzle, someone will find a way to take them out to achieve a better solution.
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Re:Vendor lockin is a myth (Score:5, Interesting)
The bottom line is that Meraki has a losing business plan, and that's why we're seeing all this thrashing. There's no way they can make money fast enough to satisfy their investors at $50/pop, they need to monetize their dashboard system, they need ads, and that's just not what most end-users want. All of this stupid price model tweaking stuff they're doing is almost certainly motivated by promises they made to investors that they subsequently couldn't keep.
If they are in fact poisoning the firmware (I have two Meraki minis, but haven't had a chance to confirm that their firmware is poisoned), I'm pretty sure this is a felony, but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble to prove it and fix it. Given that the open mesh boxes are $50 each, I can just buy two and replace the two Merakis I bought as a test project, and I'll come out ahead. It's too bad for the people who bought hundreds or thousands of these devices, though. For them, it might be worth consulting a lawyer.
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Put another way, Meraki chose to offer their hardware at an unprofitable price point and the additional incentive of openness. They hoped (in vain) that customers would be convinced to buy based on the promise of openness but ultimately would choose not to exercise their freedoms. These hackers took them up on their offer. Meraki, realizing that they were losing money, then raised their prices to a profitable level and ceased offering a fully open unit (fair enough). The hackers decided to say no thanks to
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[John]
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Who's child is going to do better in school, the one with home internet or the one who had to wait for terminal time at a public site away from home?
Bringing connectivity to an area increases economic activity in that area. By giving people a tool to communicate like internet access, they can start up everything from community-based discussion forums to small businesses online. They will think up uses for the connectivity no
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If these people were starving in the street you're right, soup kitchens would be more useful. But that's not the case here -- the intent is to improve the local economy to be on-par with the rest of the nation. The people this project is intended to help aren't homeless, and many aren't even unemployed, they're just poor.
Having things like, the ability
Re:What a bunch of bunk (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll grant you that the goal of the do-gooders was a little ephemeral compared to giving the poor food, but if your goal is sustainable improvement of the lives of the economically downtrodden, you need to do more than simply give them something to eat. Also, it's pretty damn insulting to a poor person to imply that their biggest problem is putting food on the table. Maybe their biggest problem, now that they've solved the food and housing issue, is helping their kids to a better life. You know what might help with that? Access to a computer and the internet at home.
One of the most difficult barriers to entry for folks from low-income backgrounds trying to gain some upward mobility is the lack of access to technological services/devices that those of us raised in a middle-class environment consider basic tools of life. How can you move from slinging burgers or picking strawberries (definitive low class jobs) to secretarial or temp office work (entry level middle class jobs) if you don't have a computer, or access to the internet, or excel, or MS word, etc? These guys were setting out to help bridge the "digital divide" -- explicitly trying to provide access to the online resources the middle and upper classes have to people who don't normally have access to them.
The poor have a variety of needs, don't patronize them by assuming the only need you see is the only need they have.
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Step 2 is getting people to donate old wireless devices and/or buy eepcs or XOs.
Step 3 is always profit, but this time, it's profit for the folks in the neighborhood.
I understand your confusion since step 2 is often listed as "???"
Re:What a bunch of bunk (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if it weren't a school project or coursework, if you were a kid curious about some piece of technology, you would be lucky if one of the documentary series had an article on that item, or if you found a science magazine in the local shop.
These days, anyone can do a Google search, look for online published research papers, visit online magazine articles, look at online secondhand bookstores or Amazon. All before even having to leave home. That is, if you do have a home computer, internet connection and are familiar with the various applications (desktop, login process, web browser, search engines, touch typing).
That is, if your family can afford a computer and internet access. Many employers complain that their applicants don't have basic computer literacy skills: knowing how connect a system together, keyboard skills, word processing, spreadsheets, E-mail, database packages (Maybe because anyone who does have those skills can find a better job, but it's sad that people don't already have those skills in the first place).
Just by having a computer with internet access is going to allow you to learn many more basic skills in your own time, as well as keep in touch with the rest of the community (forums, job search pages, community college courses).
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Re:Community WiFi markets bad everywhere. (Score:4, Informative)
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However many more have failed in places like Houston, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, Orlando, Tempe, Portland, and closer to home (for me) Grand Rapids and Oakland County. This list isn't complete, of course. You could ask Earthlink for a better one...
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The project in Houston didn't fail, Earthlink did. They had open access to the power company to negotiate access rights on power line poles, and never even called them. Don't mistake bad business for bad technology.
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The reason muni wifi didn't deploy as widely as expected, does not change the economics of the situation: the cost of the equipment, software, and administration will not come down until enough volume is produced. And a dozen or so major metropolitan areas represents a lot of volume.
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The economics of the situation are simple: they hired the world's most incompetent ISP, Earthlink, to manage a network. It's like two trains heading towards each other on the same track: you know from the first second that it can't go well, but you just can't look away.... Earthlink can't even manage their own network, based on the hideous connectivity I experienced. I can't imagine how anyone could have expected them to manage community wireless....
Add to that the assumption that Earthlink would have
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Community wireless fails when it is done in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. If a city does it with the intent to blanket the city and pays for it with a trivial amount of tax revenue for the good of the community, it works fine. If a city contracts it out to a company to manage it and pays the company, it works fine. If the city contracts it to a company without paying them and expects the company to cover the costs by selling faster access, it doesn't work at all, however, because 99.999% of pe
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