NEWS: Free Wi-Fi still a goer in San Fran'

While municipal Wi-Fi systems are being switched off from Philadelphia to Cupertino, San Francisco is planning to have the whole city connected wirelessly by the end of the year.

Haight-Ashbury and the Mission District are already covered by the "Free The Net" project, a mesh network run by Meraki and paid for as a research project by the company, which is backed by Google amongst others. But yesterday Mayor Gavin Newsom said the project will be available to all San Francisco residents by the end of the year.

This follows on from the last attempts to wireless-up the city, in a joint venture with Google and Earthlink. That project foundered on privacy concerns and funding problems, having someone else to pay for it might help this time around. Additionally this time Google is one step removed, which might distract those with privacy concerns.

Certainly municipal Wi-Fi isn't having a lot of success around the US. Earthlink is pulling out of its Philadelphia deployment after offering to hand over the infrastructure to anyone who wanted it and failing to find a buyer. Meanwhile MetroFi is to shut down its networks in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino and San Jose on June 20th, and is mostly concerned with avoiding the cost of ripping out the infrastructure they've got installed in lamp-posts around the area.

Residents of Geneva and St. Charles, Kane County are still waiting for MeshLinx Wireless to start installing municipal Wi-Fi, which could find itself stillborn if WiMAX deployments go ahead as expected.

Around the world the idea of cities providing a low-bandwidth Wi-Fi service to their residents for free has been considered, promoted, deployed and bankrupted time and time again, but that's not stopping San Franciso -- the city that still wants everyone to wear flowers in its hair, and with a mayor convinced that municipal Wi-Fi should be his legacy.

Reply to
John Navas
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It seems that no city funds are involved and that the company providing it intends to sell hardware/software to anyone who wants to create such a network.

The bad feature I found so far is described at , which claims that the first time you use it, you get some sort of "splash screen", which I guess is a web page, and that you can "click through it" to go to where you first intended. If you don't have a browser or use a browser, it is not clear what happens.

Reply to
Bill Z.

You have to do a bit of reading to figure out this network. The idea is for "volunteers" to purchase repeaters for their homes and thus extend the network.

Here's some more info on what it actually is

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Reply to
Roy

In ba.internet Roy wrote: : You have to do a bit of reading to figure out this network. The idea is : for "volunteers" to purchase repeaters for their homes and thus extend : the network.

And in the process, violate the terms of service of their own Internet connection.

I guess the talk of bandwidth caps will put the kibosh on this in the long run anyway.

: Here's some more info on what it actually is

:

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Reply to
Dane Jasper

I got the impression the city was asking for free rooftop space and probably power, but not for the resident to supply an internet connection to the device, which is a repeater.

In any event, this does not seem a real substitute for the previously-planned deployment which fell through.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Pope

Indeed. Bandwidth caps will put the damper on many things the Internet promised and may take away some things we take for granted now. I suspect that one day, we'll look fondly back on unlimited dial-up Internet service.

Reply to
John Higdon

The articles on it claimed that wasn't a problem due to the ISPs the company making the repeaters uses.

Reply to
Bill Z.

On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:55:38 -0700, John Higdon wrote in :

I seriously doubt that. The "caps" being considered are in the GIGAbyte range of broadband, not the MEGAbyte range of dialup. Like most people I'm not even close to that level of transfer.

I'm not sure what you mean by "things the Internet promised" -- do you?

-- but I don't see any real risk to anything other than massive audio/video downloading, which is NOT what the Internet was built for.

The real issue isn't "caps" -- it's the insanity of flat rate pricing, where normal users wind up subsidizing bandwidth hogs. It's long since time for metered usage.

Reply to
John Navas

And if you don't need it, no one does. I understand.

Could you direct me to a reference which outlines "what the Internet was built for"? I had always mistakenly assumed that it was a dumb network whose usage was limited only by the imagination of those utilizing it.

I respectfully disagree.

Reply to
John Higdon

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:46:05 -0700, John Higdon wrote in :

What part of "most people" was unclear? ;)

There are ample references to the fact that multicasting wasn't a consideration in the original design of TCP/IP, on which the Internet is based, as I'm sure you know.

I take it then that you're one of those profiting from subsidies by the rest of us. ;)

Reply to
John Navas

Just out of curiosity what sort of level of transfer are you seeing from your usage?

I see 100 megabytes since this morning, from one computer engaging in mild web usage. I do not know what I could do to reliably get under a 5 gig monthly cap. All I am running is putty and Internet Explorer. 5 gigs/month seems way low to me.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Pope

Of course it's low. A single web page with all of its graphical/video/whirly-twirly bling can amount to many megabytes. My EVDO app gives a usage report. I only use the service when out of town to basically stay in touch.

The week I spent at the NAB convention in April racked up over 2 GB of usage. That's using the computer in the hotel room in the morning and late in the evening since I didn't take it with me to the convention center. It was all from web activity (mainly checking on orders and products I was investigating at the convention), email, Usenet, and some home network administration. That's it.

Cap primary connections at 5GB/month? A lot of people are going to be hurting, big time.

Reply to
John Higdon

The part where you produced some evidence that "most people" only generated hundreds of megs of monthly traffic? :-)

I'm unclear as to how this answers the question.

Reply to
Mark McIntyre

In ba.internet John Higdon wrote: : Cap primary connections at 5GB/month? A lot of people are going to be : hurting, big time.

I don't think ANY carriers are talking about caps that low for wireline service. I've seen numbers between 150 Gigs/mo and 500 Gigs/mo in discussion from different carriers.

Reply to
Dane Jasper

: > And in the process, violate the terms of service of their own Internet : > connection.

: The articles on it claimed that wasn't a problem due to the ISPs the : company making the repeaters uses.

Can you give a reference to that? All I've seen so far is them helping people "Free" (steal) their existing connection to their cable or DSL provider.

Reply to
Dane Jasper

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:14:12 +0000 (UTC), snipped-for-privacy@speedymail.org (Steve Pope) wrote in :

Excluding work I do for clients, my monthly usage is currently in the range of 2-3 gigabytes. To be fair, the ad blocker in my browser cuts out quite a bit of traffic, but I doubt it's more than another gigabyte. I could easily live with a 5 gigabyte cap.

Reply to
John Navas

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:52:55 +0100, Mark McIntyre wrote in :

The evidence is readily available, as I'm sure you know. :-)

Why am I not surprised.

Reply to
John Navas

The usual John Navas "blow-off". Why am I not surprised.

Reply to
CJ

Thats neither an answer to the question, nor true.

At a guess, because you are incapable of detecting irony?

Reply to
Mark McIntyre

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:48:26 +0100, Mark McIntyre wrote in :

Actually both, as I'm sure you know.

At a guess, because you are incapable of detecting sarcasm?

Are we done with this silliness now? Or must you have the last word? ;)

Reply to
John Navas

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