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There was a time five years ago when you were legally obliged to mention Chaska, Minn., when writing about city-wide Wi-Fi: The small town was an early entrant into the idea of dealing with local broadband market failure to let residents jump from dial-up to a semblance of high-speed Internet. In some cities, like Lompoc, Calif., which launched efforts around the same time, cable and telco firms stepped up and made the Wi-Fi networks nearly unnecessary for indoor use.
Chaska.net still operates, however, although the operation is servicing debt and not accruing capital, which is the goal; current expenses aren't mentioned, but the setup costs were $3.3m, including $1m in fiber expense, the article in the Chaska Herald reports.
The network doesn't deliver just Wi-Fi in the city, but is part of a backbone that brings point-to-multipoint wireless broadband to smaller towns nearby, and to 36 business customers in town.
Chaska has a fairly stable base of about 2,100 subscribers, the article notes, expecting just a net add of 60 per year in the future. That's a huge uptake for a town that in 2000 has 24,000, which likely means 5,000 to 8,000 households. Subscriptions would likely be higher except the ability to get a signal isn't uniform across the town, which is true of all wireless systems, but Wi-Fi's low power limits makes it particularly susceptible.
Chaska was used by Tropos as its poster child when that firm was out trying to persuade firms and cities that high-quality "mesh" networks could be built for indoor and outdoor service using 20 to 25 nodes per square mile. Chaska never lived up to its marketing in those early days, and, Tropos at one point (apparently at its own cost) swapped out all the initial nodes installed in the city. I wrote rather heatedly about what I viewed as misleading information provided back on 12 June 2006.
It's nice to see that things worked out in Chaska. I should also note that this story, written by a local reporter, is the best example of local journalism looking at these sorts of networks that I've read in six years of covering municipal and metro-scale Wi-Fi.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 12:50 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal | No Comments
Portland, Ore., was the big win for MetroFi, back in the day, the flagship network that never was: MetroFi was unable to make its gear and business model work in a way that let them move forward, and I won't rehash the process that led them to exit the working world. However, the company left behind hundreds of SkyPilot distribution and backhaul nodes, and a $30,000 bond to remove them. The city estimates the cost will be double, and the equipment has nearly no resale value.
Mike Rogoway of the Oregonian reports that the first batch of removed gear will be handed off to Personal Telco, one of the longest-running community wireless efforts in the world, which operates a variety of free service around town. The group hopes to be able to repurpose the nodes, but I'm dubious. SkyPilot's end-point nodes had two radios, one designed for 2.4 GHz 802.11g access, and the other at 5 GHz to work with its unique point-to-point system.
(SkyPilot's approach had 8 antennas in a sectorized in its backhaul units that used GPS time synchronization to make precise, very high power point-to-point connections at scheduled intervals. One backhaul node could deliver narrow extremely high-signal power zaps of wireless communication in 8 directions seemingly "at once.")
This means that the Wi-Fi nodes have to be served by SkyPilot backhaul devices, which in turn require precise orientation and placement along with back-end management software, which was typically licensed separately.
Personal Telco suggested to Rogoway that it might disassemble them for parts, but four-year-old gear that's designed for this particular a purpose probably has little of interest, even for free.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:37 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Hardware, Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal | 2 Comments
The Miami Times finds that a network that cost $5m to build still has spotty coverage: The contract was signed with IBM in 2006, and the network only recently came online. While it has municipal purposes, it's been pushed as a way for the public to get free Wi-Fi. The reporter wasn't impressed in his attempts to gain access.
The price tag is pretty high unless there were commensurate municipal purposes in which costs were conserved and service improved, and that doesn't appear to be the story the city is telling. The city's project manager says "16,500 people have signed up to use" the network, but as we've seen with other large-scale networks, it's never quite clear whether that's unique devices, sessions, etc. "Users" is often used broadly.
Finally, I missed the mayor of Miami Beach's badly researched comment back in October, reproduced here: "We are the first in the country to have a free citywide hotspot." Except neighbor St. Cloud, Florida, and Mountain View.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 11:02 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal | 1 Comment
Minneapolis becomes the largest city in the world with a privately operated, near total coverage Wi-Fi network: The network, built and run by US Internet, claims 16,500 private subscribers. The company was able to secure advance fees from the city against future services provided, services which have not yet been built. The company was able to reach 99.5 percent coverage, it says.
This year, services will be tested, such as linking police cars and fire vehicles to the Wi-Fi network. The city's unused prepayments will be rolled over.
US Internet told the Star Tribune the network cost $20m to build. It uses BelAir network equipment, which was the same choice made by Cablevision, which is building (or perhaps has already built) the largest single-operator coverage area of Wi-Fi in the world. Unlike US Internet, Cablevision offers Wi-Fi access only to its broadband cable subscribers.
(At one point, there was a similar, larger network being built in Taipei, but I believe it was abandoned. There's no information in English that I can find, nor linked in Chinese. The last update on Taiwan's government page about this private project was from early 2006.)
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:51 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
Dana Spiegel posts an exchange with a writer at the Heartland Institute, wherein the writer starts with a bias and then stoops to insults: Oh, lordy, our friends at the industry-funded (but-we-won't-disclose-who) Heartland Institute are trying to explain how evil municipally funded free Wi-Fi is again. I thought I was back in 2005, again.
Given that Miami Beach and St. Cloud, Flor., are now just about the only free city-wide Wi-Fi funded by a city in the US, I don't see the urgency in Heartland trying to explain why it's an evil entitlement.
The Heartland "reporter" (hrmph) tells Dana Spiegel that in St. Cloud "the City Council tried to shut down their free WiFi service because of the expense but stopped that initiative after residents who could not pay for their own Internet access protested loudly. In that vein, do you foresee municipal WiFi networks like Miami Beach’s at all becoming another entitlement program for Americans?"
That's some myopia you've got there! St. Cloud residents of all stripes, not just those who "could not pay" for Internet service--that's bought-and-paid-for thinktank code for "poor and probably African American because they're poor"--were interested in keeping the service alive. The city council and mayor responded to the outpouring of interest, and funded the network further as a result.
We last tangled with the Heartland Institute in depth in 2005. I wrote a piece called "Sock Puppets of Industry" (1 February 2005) that spelled out undisclosed funding and other conflicts in a report issued on municipal broadband that was riddled with errors.
The Heartland Institute continues to claim that it is "not affiliated with any political part, business, or foundation," which continues to beggar my imagination as a statement. The institute has concocted ever more elaborate explanations as to why it doesn't disclose donors, which are known to include major firms in industries about which the institute produces anti-regulation reports. Corporations and foundations provide 89 percent of funding (per the institute's 2009 report), with corporations making up 13 to 16 percent. The foundations are the usual suspects that push money to thinktanks to create research and reports that allows affiliated companies and institutions to cite data as independent of the funders.
All you need to know about Heartland may be encompassed in the Sock Puppets post, in which I note that (at the time) Heartland had a Philip Morris executive on its board, even as it wrote reports and a book denying peer-reviewed scientific and economic analysis of the societal costs of smoking. In the comments, Heartland's head denied that such an executive was on the board, despite the fact that the Web site listed that executive and his affiliation.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:15 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal | No Comments
It goes around and around and comes out there: The city of Philadelphia has announced its intention to purchase the Wi-Fi network from Network Acquisition Company (NAC), a firm that itself acquired EarthLink's in-progress network for a song with a promise to build it out and to change its name from the placeholder it chose. Apparently, the placeholder turned out to be correct: the firm acquired the network and operated it, but it seems little else emerged in its plans, made before the massive economic downturn. NAC took control of the network in June 2008 (see "Eleventh Hour Rescue for Phila. Network.")
The Philadelphia Business Journal seems to have but sketchy details about the deal, which would commit the city to spending $17m from 2011 to 2015 (fiscal years) to expanding its core fiber network and integrating and expanding the Wi-Fi network. The wireless network would be used for municipal and public safety purposes, as well as limited public place Internet. Phila. told me years ago that it spent millions each year on leased digital lines from telecom; many cities have built fiber networks and rings to conserve that cash in house while boosting network speeds often by a factor of 10 to 100 times the leased line rate.
Update: The Philadelphia Inquirer has more information. The city will pay NAC $2m, which is roughly the same amount that NAC paid EarthLink and other parties. The $2m from the city will comprise $1.5m from homeland security grants and $500K from public-safety funds.
In this case, the city claims a $9m cost conservation against $17m in spending; the operating savings don't include increased productivity or other measurable improvements outside of pure network operation costs, however.
This is a far cry from Philadelphia's 2004 plan to give free Internet service to everyone via Wi-Fi; EarthLink's goal for Wi-Fi at subsidized and dial-up prices to residences through outdoor transmitters; and NAC's plan to mix free, fee, and business services of varying kinds to make a go of it.
Philadelphia is now trodding the path that many other cities have followed in the last five years, which is focusing on government efficiency through cost conservation and using Wi-Fi and public safety wireless as an adjunct to core wired networks.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 2:18 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal | No Comments
The town of Swindon, England, will provide free Wi-Fi to residents: The project is estimated at just £1m to install 1,400 access points around the city, which seems rather inexpensive--could that possibly include installation, backhaul, network operations, and bandwidth? The network is described as a mesh, but it's hard to know what that means these days, as the term is used too loosely.
Usage will be limited on the free service, but that hasn't been described in any of the reporting. An hour a day? 100 MB a month? A 20 Mbps (noted as 20 MB in the Guardian story) service will be available as an upgrade, but I don't know of any Wi-Fi network capable of delivering 20 Mbps on a distributed basis. 20 Mbps is tricky enough in the home over any distance.
Color me dubious about the particulars. The Web site for the service, dubbed Signal, is unpopulated. International coverage of this story is breathless, quotes from the press release, and doesn't ask anyone from the company or elsewhere about how this could possibly work.
At least the firm plans to use WPA encryption, according to its press release. The company also recommends using a "wireless" repeater, which means there's a hidden $50 to $150 cost in obtaining such an item to pull the signal in from outside.
The network will apparently be up and running by April 2010, with an initial phase launched in December 2009. Funds will be used from both public and private sources, and a local businessman's firm, Digital City UK, will handle the buildout. The Swindon town council owns 35 percent of the venture.
I don't see how the stated goals, costs, deployment, and service is feasible. I'm looking forward to further details.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 2:37 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Mesh, Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal | No Comments
The story in Colorado is that the Longmont network will keep operating under private ownership: Perhaps those of us who write about Wi-Fi, and especially large-scale networks, have followed Longmont too closely, but the city has a long-running network and hit all the high notes in the municipal wireless symphony. The latest of three providers to operate a Wi-Fi network failed to pay taxes and utility pole leases, and the city put up a ballot measure to try to take over the network. The measure failed in part because the city wasn't allowed to explain fully what it was doing due to Colorado law prohibiting municipal lobbying for this sort of measure.
However, there's a happy ending. The county in which Longmont is found auctioned off DHB Networks' gear; it was purchased by the owners of RidgeviewTel and StarNet. RidgeviewTel has been operating the network since DHB's equipment was seized in September by the county.
The company sees 1,900 unique devices connected to the network in the afternoon and early evening, which shows the utility of the network for its users. The firm will layer WiMax on top of Wi-Fi in just a few weeks.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 9:13 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal | No Comments
Coshocton County, Ohio, shutters a hotzone because of a movie download: The local paper reports that Sony Pictures notified OneCommunity, which operates the county's one-block hotzone, that a movie was downloaded "illegally." The article doesn't provide enough details to know whether this was via BitTorrent, a pirate movie site, or other means. It's possible it was a perfectly legal download that Sony doesn't like, too, such as a transfer of a movie for personal use or a legal movie download that was mischaracterized.
In any case, it doesn't seem that Sony nor the MPAA (which is mentioned in the article but didn't apparently contact the county at all) asked for the network to be shut down. Further, there's no legal basis on which to close down a network because of illegal use. The common-carrier and other ISP laws protect such operations, even though if Sony had filed suit the ISP might have had to produce certain logs and other connection records.
My friend Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing went with the knee-jerk headline: "MPAA Shuts Down Entire Town's Muni WiFi over a Single Download," when it wasn't a whole town, the MPAA wasn't apparently involved, and the shutdown was by the county, which didn't have to do so. The MPAA told MediaPost that it "didn't ask for the network to be shuttered."
What's likely here is that the county overreacted, and decided to limit any potential liability immediately, even though no sanctions or actions were apparently threatened by Sony (or the MPAA). In similar cases, private and governmental bodies have simply said, "Whatever" or turned to groups like the EFF for support.
Update: The network was brought back up on Friday. Sony received a number of complaints about its actions, despite not actually having asked the county to turn its network off. Sony reportedly emailed the county, and must have said it wouldn't pursue any action, which led to the county turning the network back on.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 2:28 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cluelessness, Hot Spot, Legal, Municipal | No Comments
This isn't a referendum on cities running Wi-Fi, but shows how freaked out incumbents still get over muni-Fi: Longmont, Colo.'s independent Wi-Fi service provider was struggling, and the city wanted the ability to take over the service should the company fail. However, a variety of Colorado laws required the city to be vague and not spend money saying exactly what it planned to do. Cable operators spent hundreds of thousands to defeat the measure, which implied that the city could run a triple-play system, even over fiber.
Now that the election's over, all the details have come out, and the city may take another go at it. About 400 to 600 citizens will lose Internet access.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:58 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Craig Settles writes about Comcast's attempt to prevent Longmont, Colo., from operating a Wi-Fi network which has defaulted to city ownership: Comcast's sock puppets and trade association have poured at least $150,000 in a campaign to prevent the city of Longmont from operating a Wi-Fi network that a private firm built and was unable to operate. Settles notes that Longmont is also sitting on top of a fiber network that it built, and then was legislated away from being able to use. Sigh.
Flashbacks to the 2005-2006 era, for sure. The argument has been made that Longmont is usurping private enterprise by taking over the network, instead of, as has been proved elsewhere, building demand for broadband and also providing it in places that incumbent carriers are unable to. City-wide Wi-Fi data rates are well below typical cable and most DSL service rates, and wired services tend to be more reliable. Customers who use a free network either would never subscribe to wired fee-based service, or, after tasting the sweet juice of YouTube and others, decides that 5 to 20 Mbps downstream would be even more succulent.
Settles notes that the hoary arguments that cities can't effectively run broadband networks are easily refuted by examples of governments that, by building such networks, rapidly conserve their data communications costs, and then save taxpayer dollars while often expanding service and efficiency. (Settles consults with cities on this topics, but his facts are public.)
The real issue, of course, is whether Comcast and other incumbents can compete against public entities. And the answer is, of course. But those firms have to become a better deal, improve customer service, and charge less--just as they do whenever they are in a truly competitive market with multiple effective broadband providers. Cities have no inherent advantage on networks that are built right, because outside of a few free Wi-Fi networks, cities charge a market price that's typically not cheaper than a competitive broadband price for the same level of service.
What Comcast should have done, were it cleverer about this matter, was offer to take over the Wi-Fi network, build it even better, and offer limited free service to all residents and visitors (maybe an hour a day), unlimited service for the city, and unlimited service for all its subscribers. This would motivate more people to sign up with Comcast or remain customers, and would benefit the city as a whole. $150,000 would have bought a lot of Wi-Fi.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:03 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal, Sock Puppets | No Comments
The free network that covers the small city of St. Cloud, Flor., is still in jeopardy: The Orlando Sentinel looks at how St. Cloud residents use the free network that's paid for by the city. Earlier this year, the city council looked to shed the $30K per month paid for service and upkeep due to a shrunken budget. Residents begged the city to continue the network, and the council was able to extend service until January, at which point all bets may be off.
The network is the only publicly funded free Wi-Fi network in the United States that attempts to cover a city and provide indoor access. Previously, I had stated more broadly (and incorrectly) that it was the only city-wide free network, but Phil Belanger among others reminded me that the Google-run Mountain View, Calif., network has a long history of free operation as well.
Still, there are only a handful of public access networks of any kind that cover cities. Miami Beach, Flor., apparently this week just got its act together after years of work to push out city-wide service, with the intention of covering 70 percent of indoor users and 95 percent of outdoor locations with free service. We'll see how that pans out.
Back in St. Cloud, the biggest impact of the network's potential disappearance is on, as usual, the city's most vulnerable population, including Del Miller, who relies on the service for personal contact and vital communications, and Patricia Bennett, who has no car, and would otherwise be unable to keep up her job search and maintain unemployment benefits.
Vulnerable and unemployed citizens might be better served by creating a public-private partnership with the city kicking in some money for subsidized home service, or working with incumbent carriers for low-income services. AT&T, I believe, still has a $10/mo. low-speed DSL offering which would easily be as fast as whatever the St. Cloud network delivers over Wi-Fi.
When city-wide Wi-Fi was first proposed, one of the key reasons was a lack of affordable access for all residents. While the availability of broadband has improved, its affordability has not.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 2:40 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal | No Comments
Residents of St. Cloud, Flor., made the case for continuing the city's free network: St. Cloud was one of the first, and remains one of the only free city-wide networks (sorry for ignoring you before, Google and Mountain View, Calif.). Dozens of residents attending a city council meeting yesterday, the Orlando Sentinel reports, demanded the service continue. They were angry!
The council opted to extend public access for four months, revisiting the issue in 60 days to see if they can come up with the budget. The network costs about hundred of thousands of dollars a year to operate, but only the public portion would be shut down, as the municipal-only side apparently justifies its cost. [link via MuniWireless]
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 3:48 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal | No Comments
Venice, Italy, installs Wi-Fi free for those who live and work there, and for-fee for visitors: The city of canals has launched one of the largest outdoor Wi-Fi networks in continental Europe. (The UK has a number of outdoor networks that may be as large.) The network is free for residents, and in September will be opened at no cost to people who work or study in the city. Also in September, visitors can pay €5 per day for access, although advance-purchase discounted passes are also available as part of a visitors' program.
Fabio Zambelli has an extensive photo gallery (and coverage in Italian) at setteB.it.
Service initially covers downtown, the Lido, and public parks in Mestre. Additional islands and parks will be added by the fall.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:12 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: International, Municipal | No Comments
Report from IPI not surprisingly gets its facts all wrong: It's been a long, long time since I had to apply the "sock puppet" tag to a post, but it's been a while since telecom-funded thinktanks that don't disclose their funding have written reports that allege to explain why municipal ownership of telecom services are always mismanaged. I came to be a fan of public/private operations, in which cities and towns figured out their needs, and worked with private contractors who would own and operate networks that would serve many purposes (public, academic, digital divide, public safety, and municipal). Networks built along these lines have been completed and get good marks; those that were built entirely by municipalities or for entirely public access purposes seem to have faded away, except for a few restricted to relatively small towns.
The latest report, by Barry Aarons, is called "We Told You So! Continue to Say 'No' to Municipal Broadband Networks." I suppose his next report will be title, "Cars Are So Much Better Than Horses," and "DC Power: Work of Satan."
In any case, Aarons, formerly associated with major telecoms and who works as industry consultant, appears to be trying to forestall putting stimulus broadband dollars into municipal hands. I tend to agree: I'd rather see non-profits and local telecom groups use existing expertise and knowledge of underserved audiences to built out infrastructure. Cities, towns, and counties likely have a role in establishing and leasing rights of way and facilitating access for others putting services in.
However, I have to take issue with the facts. There are essentially no municipal Wi-Fi networks of the type that Aarons wants to use as a strawman. Over and over, this report cites private efforts, and misstates facts.
Page 1: "For example, in Tempe, Arizona there were three times as many antennas required at a cost of over $1 million or twice the original cost." True, but that network was built by what became Kite Networks, and which wasn't well designed. The city didn't buy any services from the network, but was supposed to receive free roaming accounts in exchange for the quasi-franchise.
Page 2: "And now that analog television broadcasting has been eliminated it is likely that portions of that spectrum may become available for expanded wireless competition." That spectrum was already auctioned off for $20 billion to AT&T, Verizon, and others.
"...some communities’ municipal wireless projects are, in fact, alive and well. And there still appears to be an appetite for such programs as evidenced by the estimated $900 million invested to this point." Invested, almost entirely, by private entities.
On Philadelphia: "...city officials thought they could get existing companies to let them use refurbished gear and could build the entire project with 'non-city' financial resources." In the very early stages of the plan, there was no mention of refurbished gear; "non-city" would mean that it wouldn't be paid for by the city?
Subsequent paragraphs cite the failure of the Philadelphia network, but that was built entirely with private dollars. The city put in some funds for initial studies and such, but the money spent on the network was from EarthLink. Further, Aarons writes that EarthLink "closed down this project on June 12, 2008." EarthLink exited the effort, but the network is still running, with a private firm having assumed the assets and operation.
Page 3: "Philadelphia’s experience was considered the flagship of government projects covering huge amounts of area with a system that was considered in 2005 to be the cutting edge." Well...no. It was the flagship of privately funded metro-scale networks that cities requested would be built with no public money, ownership, nor control. And because the network started being built in 2006, it's not that odd that it used 2005 technology.
On Portland: "And then there is Portland, Oregon, a system that crashed and burned from the start. The city hired a start up company to construct and install its municipal Wi-Fi system." Bzzzt! Sorry! MetroFi paid all its own costs. The city spent a tiny, tiny sum in services, never contracting for its offerings, even. (Had it, Portland would have been using MetroFi as a service provider, much like a telecom.)
"So MetroFi is in default and millions of dollars are yet to be spent to finish a system that is at best 20 to 30 percent completed. The probability is that the project will not be completed at all." Did Aarons write this report in mid-2008? The footnotes aren't from any later than May 2008. The network will never be finished and no one is interested in that.
"So what in Portland went wrong? MetroFi found that municipal government ultimately was unwilling to provide the subsidy that would be necessary to support the system." Uh...wait...so...doesn't that indicate that a privately funded network that attempted and failed to seek public service contracts can't succeed?
On Ashland, Ore.: Ashland isn't Wi-Fi. And it's only mentioned here because it's an ongoing strawman for thinktanks. Note that the figures here date back to 2001: "Begun in 2000....after only one year." Aarons may be using a 2001 report, that I found largely inaccurate, to pull this example in.
On Lompoc, Calif.: This small-town network had a lot of problems, and, in fact, was the poster child of bad network planning and spending. However, it's a) small time and b) nearly sui generis. Only Saint Paul Park, Minn., a similarly small town, had an equally bad blowout after spending city money for a municipally owned network. I don't know of a similar third example in which public funds were used. (Hey, see this is how you write something that accepts contrary examples to one's thesis! What a concept.)
Page 4: On Orlando, Flor.: I don't know anybody who ever cited Orlando, which Aarons note had a short-lived and very inexpensive hotzone in 2004 to 2005.
I can't make heads or tails of this report follow-up. If you read this accurately, fixing Aarons's errors, he's saying that private companies attempting to build large-scale Wi-Fi networks all fail. In the intro, he writes, "We noted in particular that the expense to the cities and counties would likely make these government owned projects expensive failures." Yet the only example that involved significant city dollars is Lompoc; the rest were private efforts, with private risks (and losses).
Of course, Aarons doesn't point to San Francisco, where a private company, Meraki, is building a ground-up Wi-Fi network; to Minneapolis, where a private firm contracted for city services and built a network at its own expense that appears to have enough customers to make a go of it; at Cablevision's huge system, funded by private dollars for its own customers; and so forth.
I don't quite know how or why this "report" came into being, but it's specious from beginning to end. I would have enjoyed seeing a report that attempted to explain from the regulatory and competitive angle why EarthLink, MetroFi, and Kite failed in their efforts (among those of others), as it might teach something to future businesses launching efforts.
In a bit of not quite irony, Aarons praises WiMax in passing. But Clearwire's WiMax service (and all the independent WiMax companies that might come into being for niche markets) has the same constraints and properties as the private firms that failed to make Wi-Fi work on a large scale. WiMax has superior technical characteristics, but it's still a metro-scale network of a type that hasn't been built before.
With WiMax, however, cities didn't issue RFPs. Perhaps, in the ideological world in which these reports are written, that makes all the difference.
Aarons is like a cold warrior, long after the Soviet Union fell. (Perhaps a bad example given the current leadership in Russia.) Long ago, cities and private firms seemed to have mostly decided that cities won't build wireless networks. The battle was lost with private funds.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 2:49 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cluelessness, Municipal, Sock Puppets | 5 Comments
Santa Clara electrical utility buys MetroFi's SkyPilot Wi-Fi nodes: The Silicon Valley Power (SVP) Meter Connect program will use the wireless backbone for automatic meter infrastructure (AMI) as part of a program to switch to smart meters and provide demand-based pricing and response for customers. They'll start with a pilot with a couple thousand smart meters, and eventually replace 45,000 residential and 6,000 business meters. Meters and the back-end systems are out for bid.
The current bill for providing American infrastructure rebuilding includes $4.5b in smart-grid spending, and utilities will be vying for hunks of this to pay or subsidize infrastructure updates. The money is well spent. The smarter the grid, the less power people and businesses use at peak times (through higher prices for peak power or incentives for conservation), and the less idle off-peak power plants have to be in place.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 9:38 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal, Power Line
The company operating Wi-Fi in some New York parks is closing down: Eagle-eyed correspondent Klaus Ernst noted that the Wi-Fi in the parks project has shut down. Wi-Fi Salon, the concessionaire for most of the major parks, posted a message about the current economic conditions, but the note is undated.
I was always dubious about Wi-Fi Salon due to the surreal technical explanations made by its founder, its small size and lack of real-world experience, and the extensive delays in every step of the project. Ultimately, something closer to kiosks than coverage were erected, and I've never seen any usage numbers.
Community Wi-Fi organizers in New York City had a variety of other ideas about how to offer free Wi-Fi, but parks had its own agenda. Let's see if they approach this differently this time around.
Update: Marshall Brown, Wi-Fi Salon's founder, takes issue with my characterization of his operations. No one--especially me--ever claimed that building outdoor networks was easy. From all that's happened in the last few years, it's clear that building large, sustainable, free (sponsored or otherwise) networks requires many stakeholders, a diverse revenue stream, and real purposes for a network beyond public access.
Crain's reports on the issue: Possibly prompted by my post (or by Brown's outrage), Crain's New York Business writes about the shut down and Brown's new project, which has put Wi-Fi into Union Square. Brown's new venture, Wired Towns, is talking to business improvement districts about outdoor Wi-Fi across New York City.
Yet another update: Sewell Chan of the New York Times provides more details about the timeline involved.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 12:36 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal | 2 Comments
Oklahoma City, home to several hundred sq mi of municipal Wi-Fi, finds another application: Okla. City is working on a $4m plan to reduce the costs and inflexibility of their traffic-light management system. A local news station quotes the city's IT director saying that such a move could cut commuter time on average by 5 percent and stops by 8 percent, as well as allowing dynamic changes for special events. Many cities use outdated and bizarre control channel systems that long predate modern networking; Oklahoma City has none in place at all right now.
I'm channeling one Mr Craig Settles here, but if you have applications for a network before it's built, then you have a purpose to build it, and then more applications emerge that make sense once it's built. Paying $4m to allow remote signal control will likely save residents, commuters, and businesses far more in increasing productivity and reducing gas use, if the numbers the IT director holds up. Beyond that, it likely makes the efficiency of managing intersections far far higher, reducing delays and expense from signals that stop working.
On the other hand, predictions about changes in travel time to improvements in congestion tend to not come true, according to the book Traffic. If you make roads easier to travel, people travel those roads more.
Harvard Square Business Association uses Meraki Solar to extend network: The eagles come home to roost. Meraki was founded by nearby MIT graduate students. The Industry Standard says Harvard Square is officially the first customer for the solar devices. Meraki's founder told me a few weeks ago that in beta testing, they found that solar devices were just as important in the developed world for difficult-to-reach locations: Places where bringing power was so expensive (and involved a recurring bill, in some cases) that solar was more sensible even with the $850 to $1,500 price tag for Meraki Solar.
If you figure that such a device might only burn $50 in power a year, but that bringing power to a rooftop could cost $500 to $2,000, if you're even allowed to hire someone to wire the power correctly), the solar option is perfectly sensible.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:44 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal
A few days ago, I questioned the Wall Street Journal's statement about 28,000 daily unique users on Philadelphia's network: The Phila. network, operated by NAC, covers more than 75 sq mi of the city, but the Journal said that the areas available for free usage were only the parks. I couldn't reconcile how 28,000 unique people (or devices) were using the network in public areas (parks?) each day.
Turns out the Journal was conflating "public areas" with public access. The Wi-Fi service is available throughout the city, in the same way it was under EarthLink's operation, which means that many people are using it from their homes or businesses. Still, it's a relatively remarkable number.
The folks behind the network said that weekdays see 25,000 to 28,000 unique users based on MAC addresses, which are reasonably good gauges for unique users. Someone with a laptop and an iPhone would be counted twice, of course, but the overall contraction from unique devices to people is probably less than 10 percent. Monthly uniques by MAC are 125,000 (November).
One of the principals behind the current network's owner also noted that 40 percent of network use is from Apple gear, including the iPhone, iPod touch, and computers; PC systems represent 30 percent.
I keep trying to pin down which network has the most usage in the world, and Philadelphia is the likely winner, with San Francisco's Meraki network as No. 2, and Minneapolis (with a claimed 10,000+ subscribers) at No. 3.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:01 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal
First, it was the poles; then the performance; then the lawsuit: Now, the settlement. The city of St. Louis Park, Minn., wanted to build a city-owned Wi-Fi network that would cope with the problems of its dense canopy. They chose a vendor, unfortunately, that had never built a network using the technology that the vendor chose to use.
The network required 16-foot tall poles that were originally rather unsightly. And 400 poles would be needed city wide. Citizens were revolted and did revolt; a new design for the poles reduced their ugliness, one can see from photos, but the network--solar powered to boot--never achieved the performance required under the contract, the city said.
Last December, the city moved to terminate its contract and later filed a lawsuit. The settlement signed by Arinc and approved by the city a few days ago calls from Arinc to pay $1m, and grant ownership of about 8 miles of fiber run by Arinc along with related gear. The city will be responsible for the estimated $150,000 cost to remove the equipment from poles and take the poles down, but the Wi-Fi nodes and solar panels go back to Arinc. (Which will sell them on eBay, most likely.)
Arinc claimed at various times that it had performed the tasks for which it was contracted, and that interference was beyond its control. Given that there's an incredibly successful network nearby in Minneapolis that appears to have suffered from few or none of the problems in St. Louis Park, it's hard to credit that. (Minneapolis paid nothing for the network, but is paying $1.25m a year for 10 years for services.)
St. Louis Park is thus left without a network, with at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in hard costs and staff time that lacks recompense (as the settlement covers only expenses after the network started to be built), and with a bunch of fiber they say they have no particular plan for.
Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:56 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Municipal