Muni. Wi-Fi is dead? (and do the test)

It's IT Blogwatch: in which the future for municipal Wi-Fi looks even bleaker. Not to mention doing the test...

The grey lady's Ian Urbina comes up to speed:

It was hailed as Internet for the masses when Philadelphia officials announced plans in 2005 to erect the largest municipal Wi-Fi grid in the country, stretching wireless access over 135 square miles with the hope of bringing free or low-cost service to all residents, especially the poor. Municipal officials in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and 10 other major cities, as well as dozens of smaller towns, quickly said they would match Philadelphia’s plans. But the excited momentum has sputtered to a standstill, tripped up by unrealistic ambitions and technological glitches. The conclusion that such ventures would not be profitable led to sudden withdrawals by service providers like EarthLink, the Internet company that had effectively cornered the market on the efforts by the larger cities. more

Mike Gunderloy adds:

There was a time a few years ago when it looked like web workers would be able to find free (or at least pervasive) Wi-Fi access in major cities across the nation. Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, and other cities announced ambitious plans to blanket their municipalities with access. But now ... those hopes are fading ... The Times blames Earthlink for torpedoing much of the momentum, thanks to a reassessment of the potential for making a profit. But does it really matter to web workers? more

Paul Glazowski:

Wouldn’t it be nice if Wi-Fi were everywhere? And cheap? Maybe even entirely tax-subsidized? Unfortunately, that dream-turned-partial-reality is slowly deteriorating ... Which raises a question. Why build from scratch? Why build networks independent of already-established cable-based ones? Why not employ measures similar to what BT and Fon have accomplish in the UK and elsewhere? Considering the prevalence of cable-based subscriberships in cities all across the US, why not open wireless access points - a large number of which are given as incentives with the purchase of new connections - for broader usage than current subscriber contracts allow? If the goal of ISPs is to reach more people in the easiest and most convenient way possible (wirelessly), then the example set by Spain-based Fon and its partner to the north should be one that is adopted too here in the States. more

Sam Churchill asks what went wrong:

EarthLink’s Wi-Fi coverage required more node density, going from 25 access points per sq mile to 42 per sq mile, increasing their cost. Client-side signal boosters were also required for improved reception. The network so far has left the northeast and northwest areas of the [Philadelphia] unbuilt and without service. EarthLink also ran into issues at the backhaul layer, where its rooftop towers are linked together. The plan was to use as many Motorola Canopy line-of-sight microwave radios as possible, but in order to get around corners and past trees, EarthLink has had to add Alvarion BreezeAccess VL non-line-of-sight radios. Now EarthLink’s costs are running double what the company anticipated at this point in the project. more

TheRaven64 isn't surprised:

Coverage is an easy problem to solve. You just need a lot of access points. A really, really, large number, in fact. Walking around campus, I see access points in almost every room. Looking into the distance, I can see the cell tower that gives coverage to the campus and most of the city. Individual access points might be cheaper than cell towers, but the amount needed to cover a given area aren't when you factor in the cost of wiring them all up and the cost of sending someone out to fix them when they are damanged (much easier to secure and diagnose faults with fewer towers). Since WiFi uses unregulated spectrum, you also have to put up with the fact that microwaves, private access points, and so on can all interfere with your network. If someone starts jamming your UMTS tower then you can get them arrested. more

Still, WiMAX will fix all this right? Er no, says Grahame Lynch:

Australia’s first WiMAX operator, Hervey Bay’s Buzz Broadband, has closed its network, with the CEO labeling the technology as a “disaster” that “failed miserably.” In an astonishing tirade to an international WiMAX conference audience in Bangkok yesterday afternoon, CEO Garth Freeman slammed the technology, saying its non-line of sight performance was “non-existent” beyond just 2 kilometres from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP. more

And Dale Dougherty notes another issue:

Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council meeting to make the claim that wireless caused health problems in general and to them specifically. These emotional pleas made the Council rescind its previous resolution ... the World Health Organization found that "there is no scientific basis for the belief that EHS is caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields" ... The effect of the resolution would have been to add a few wireless access points downtown. There are already several hundred in private homes and businesses in town. The same people who oppose public wifi still walk along streets and into buildings where they are invisibly bathing in wifi. Will this small group of people now demand that we outlaw wireless in public areas, just to accommodate their fears? more

And finally...

• Do the test
  

Buffer overflow:

• 4sysops: Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2008 - Why so many tools? Why not just one?
• The Raw Feed: Network Solutions Censors Anti-Koran Web Site
• Educated Guesswork: Woah. UTM looks pretty nice
• David Marshall:Transitive ships latest cross-platform virtualization solution for Solaris
• Jon Oltsik: Analyzing the shut down of Lockdown
• Timothy Lee: When We Said OLPC Should Act Like A Tech Company, We Didn't Mean Microsoft
• I, Cringely: War of the Worlds: The Human Side of Moore's Law
• Matthew Gertner: Bridging Desktop And Web Applications - A Look At Mozilla Prism

Other Computerworld bloggers:

• Douglas Schweitzer: Microsoft Word vulnerability confirmed
• Angela Gunn: Digg mob dispenses rough justice to alleged thief
• David DeJean: An SDHC driver for Palms? If Dmitry says so . . .
• Mike Elgan: Airline allows cell phone calls in-flight
• Seth Weintraub: Gartner flip flops on iPhone in the enterprise
• David Haskin: Laptop bloatware: Paying bullies to end abuse
• Preston Gralla: New Search engine report: Microsoft-Yahoo has no chance against Google
• Robert L. Mitchell: Staples stumbles
• Jaikumar Vijayan: Hannaford gets hit with lawsuits. How ready are you for one?
• Mark Hall: Real security for virtual data centers
• Shark Tank: All your trivia belongs to us
• Shark Bait: How to burst a bubble

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You too can pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Sequoia e-vote audit scrapped (and OMG robots!)
• FCC 700 MHz auction succeeds yet fails (and tBay)
• Vista SP1 is people-ready-ish (and squirrel-scale)