Governing magazine weighs in on the municipal benefits of city-wide Wi-Fi: "What early results in Corpus Christi indicate is that the nationwide buzz around municipal WiFi is all wrong...Where WiFi actually does ignite life-altering change is on the government side." Hard to put it better. I've been trying to tell reporters interested in muni-fi for the last two years that the sexy part (public access and digital divide) is only the tip of the iceberg: two other legs of the tripod must be services to municipalities (meter reading, mobile workers, public safety, etc.) and services to business (replacement T-1 and the like). This is a pretty fabulous overview, and a must read for anyone not yet up to speed on why these networks go far beyond residential Wi-Fi access.
I was in Las Vegas recently and used a Borders Book Store connection. Once I had logged into that network I then setup a VPN connection via AnchorFree's Hotspot Shield.
Would a MitM setup have been able to capture anything other than the original conection's signin data?
[Editor's note: Through follow-up email, "toukoob" checked and AnchorFree uses an SSL/TLS secured setup, which eliminates the MitM potential by validating the certificate.--gf]
Best of luck to EarthLink, but what happens to cities such as Corpus Christi if they can't turn a profit? As noted in the article, Corpus Christi is not a very tech-savvy city. I think EarthLink will face a huge battle to even reach 5% penetration. EarthLink is still not charging for access and there has been zero promotion of the network to the city.
I know the city has some agreement to purchase X amount of service per year, but I doubt that would even cover the cost of maintaining the network itself. Even in a dream world, if EarthLink could reach 20% penetration I don't think the network in its current state would even be able to support that much traffic. They would be forced to spend millions more to upgrade the network.
Which brings me back to the opening statement. The buzz about muni wi-fi is wrong. If the real benefits and uses of the network will be for government use, why are we engineering the networks for citizens?
No matter how much I think about it, the numbers just don't add up. Someone explain to me how EarthLink is going to run a profitable business.
They are charging $17-21 per month as introductory rates, but I believe I read their goal was $25 per user to be profitable. It doesn't matter really, because I wouldn't pay any of those rates. I had DSL years ago and there is no way you could make me go back to something slower and less reliable.
Interesting point, however EarthLink in Philadelphia started to early with adverts on the side of busses and I really see them running into lots of problems. I can't understand why one simple part of their network they can't keep up half the time, it's the hotzone in there famed love park. I here there gonna be adding stuff to make the network better, but it's bee like this now for 6 months and well I don't see how by October the city will be fully covered, good luck EarthLink, your going to need it!!!