Ryberg, Nicholas wrote: > themselves. From what I hear about proposals for the Mpls project, > end users will have to pay a fee, just like they do to use wireless at > Starbucks and Caribou, and that fee will be more than typical DSL > broadband service. > 'typical DSL broadband', meaning narrowband 256kbps or 1.5mbps/256kbps? $25-30 (depending on modem rental or purchase) a month is the cheapest narrowband in the area as far as I know (excluding taxes and fake provider imposed tax-fees). This is also via Qwest which may not even be servicing the entire city depending on the state of the wire plant. City officials are targeting $18 to $24 a month. There also seems to be a city area fiber network component, I'm not sure how this is to be operated, it would be interesting to see how this compares to in-city loop charges by local providers. Time Warner got in a bit of a tiff with Minneapolis by using their cable franchise to deploy telcom services via another department of their business. > B) Municipal Wifi is a glitzy, technical solution to a political > problem that doesn't exist (yet). There are hundreds of ways for > citizens to get involved in democracy without using a mouse. I find > the prospect of providing access to democracy through a communication > channel that requires at least some investment up front to defeat the > purpose. You have to have money to own computers. Yes, and computers cost along the lines of $335 from Wal-Mart. Are we going to start carping about the TV coverage of the Minnesota House and Senate because it requires an up-front investment for end-users? You also have to have money to own a car, etc. I don't see this as a access to democracy issue, I see this as an access to society issue. Much is happening online that will not happen in meatspace. Access to news outside of the mainstream. Sites like wikipedia that share knowledge. Having library access is nice, but much of the time people want to ask the question and have the question answered now, rather than later. > C) Municipal Wifi isn't going to destroy small ISP's. Wifi, just in > case you hadn't noticed, is just a networking methodology and not a > very good one at that. It's slow, it's unreliable, and it's insecure > as hell. Somebody has to provide the link up to the cloud on the back > end, and carping about about "communism" sounds more like someone who > wasn't there when the contracts were being signed. > Depending on implementation. They aren't targeting hotspot users but home and buisnesses more likely. Licensing software that can easily handle this issue is not out of the question. Also, the 'link up to the cloud' for the back end is included, see above. I would be interested in anyone who thinks that WPA2 with either TKIP or CCMP alongside a EAP-PEAP/EAP-TTLS authentication implementation is unworkable for security. Yes, this does mean that anything older than XP or Windows 2000 needs a client. OS X users would be forced to use panther or a client. Unless you've actually tried this stuff out its very hard to say its 'insecure as hell'. The harder part is making sure that whatever is implemented is able to handle roaming, coverage planning, etc. It would be a shame if the city picked someone who just plans on smacking a bunch of hardware on poles without the experience of actually providing for either a campus or a large building in the past. In any case, more than one hardware vendor has been drastically improving 'real-time' radio management and its a bit harder to say that its completely unreliable. Some vendors are even looking at mesh-based abilities on their outdoor equipment (or already have such ability). My feeling is that even the commercial providers here will admit that technically its possible to have high quality networks -- my worry is that the only way to get to the price target is to shoot for the worst equipment and expertise, so it may not be worth it in the first place if its just about price and not about infrastructure. > Now - Municipal WiMax...that's a whole different ball of wax. Give us > ten years of technology growth with corresponding drops in Wimax NIC > prices, and then maybe you've got something that'll border on a true > community effort. As great as mobile wimax sounds, I think its really going to be a niche. Most places will end up using 802.11g or n whenever it comes out and when the whole muni wifi market is saturated there wont be much need for wimax yet. True 'mobile' users who need wide area access will be buying into HSPDA or EV-DO. Sprint is already rolling out EV-DO in over 50 markets (albiet only on clusters of towers supposedly) and supposedly in 2007-2008 land we will see T-Mobile starting to roll out UMTS/HSPDA. T-Mobile has to buy the spectrum they need first from the FCC which won't happen until 2006, but they definately have the capitol from their parent company to do what they want. T-Mobile also added additional outstate coverage via roaming[1] that is already EDGE enabled. Verizon should have EV-DO shortly, too. Cingular, a more minor player in this market since they do rely more heavily than others for outstate coverage, is also looking at HSPDA but it is unkown when that will be forthcoming. But with all this EV-DO and eventually HSPDA coming, its hard to say any wimax mobile plans will pan out to be worthwhile. Wimax fixed may be useful if they can undercut price and give more performance than Cable has, especially for businesses where Comcast charges $150-200 for connectivity. [1] http://members.aol.com/mysocalledchaos/850.jpg -- Scott Dier <dieman at ringworld.org>
