[wplug] muni wif non-starter

[Patrick Wagstrom]

terry mcintyre wrote:
> Coverage: Walnut Street from Aiekn to S. Negley; Resources: 17 nodes
> 
> Multiply by hundreds of miles of streets in the Pittsburgh area, you do 
> the math.
> 
> Econ 101: Businesses don't long remain well-funded if they throw away 
> resources on projects which don't return profits. There is a time to 
> ignore welfare queens who desperately beg for free goodies.

Exactly!  The most successful wifi networks are small and localized 
(airports, hotels, etc), where the revenue is going to be high with 
relatively low usage and high turnover.

Jon Peha has led a project at Carnegie Mellon that has investigated the 
prospects of a municipal wifi network in the city with the city as the 
anchor subscriber for most of their services (extra stuff for police, 
fire, medical, meter maids, etc).  However, without an additional 
substantial base, it still is cheaper to just get the 3G/EDGE/GPRS cards 
for laptops which tend to be marginally more reliable.  Most of the cost 
comes from the fact that the city does not own light poles and power 
poles -- all access is leased from Duquesne Light or Verizon.  That's a 
huge cost there -- and one which Verizon has little incentive to help with.

They did some pretty interesting modeling of the economics of the 
situation and found that only a few neighborhoods met the criteria for a 
successful network over the entire neighborhood:  Squirrel Hill south 
and Greenfield (props to my peeps!).  Several other areas came close, 
SqHill North and Shadyside.  However, the issue with all these 
neighborhoods is that most people already have network access.

Anyway, the research was presented to the council sometime in the 
spring.  If I recall corrrectly, Peduto is on board with it, but the 
rest of the council isn't.  Of course, one may also say that Peduto 
chooses to ignore the economics of wiring up Homewood and Hazelwood in 
favor of looking tech savy.

--Patrick