[wplug] [OT] Re: muni wif non-starter

[Bryan J. Smith]

terry mcintyre <terrymcintyre at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The article which started this thread mentioned that cities are
> unwilling to pay to be anchor customers. Of course, given
> Pittsburgh's track record of falling for every boondoggle under the
> sun ( two stadiums and a half-empty convention center and a vastly
> unprofitable Lazarus department store come to mind ), it is likely
> that Pittsburgh politicians will, as usual, fail to exercise due
> diligence before voting to spend still more taxpayer dollars. 

Pittsburgh does not have a monopoly on misappropriating funds.

In the fairly tourist income-influx of Orlando, we have found a way
to build ourselves an over-sized, under-utilized convention center, a
massive and overly-spacious court house, a defunct and embarrassing
city hall, and a luxurious education administrative office.  Yet
every time the tax increases come up, they show schools falling
apart.  I for one have taken the Orlando-Orange County budget apart
and showed how many inexpensive schools they could have built instead
of spending it on these luxurious public service buildings.  I for
once would like to force Orange County Public School (OCPS)
administrators to sit in their own schools, and let the kids learn in
their administrative building.  And I'm tired of them expanding the
convention center.

Then again, I live (and vote) in Seminole County for a reason. 
Furthermore, we have had black pen ink voting machines for almost
three (3) decades.  It will spit back out if you filled in a box
incorrectly or your vote spilled over into another box.  And it has
FULL ACCOUNTING of votes, with the actual ballot the "final, paper
accounting" for each voter.

> It may be that, for their own purposes, a smart city government
> prefers some other more affordable option(s). This is very
> interesting, since cities have hundreds or thousands of employees
> wandering around - inspectors, parking maids, police officers,
> firemen - who presumably could use muni wifi. 

And they should be the ones who implement it, but not for the general
public.  For them, a 1.5Mbps, fault-tolerant, self-healing, 2.4GHz
mesh works quite well.  I've implemented such myself in the past
using Motorola Mesh Networks.

> What problem does muni wifi solve? Cable and DSL are already
> affordable for most homes, and prices are dropping every year. Wifi
> routers are cheap enough that most people with broadband install a
> wifi router. Free or inexpensive wifi is already available at many
> libraries and coffeeshops and other small businesses, which use it
> to attract customers. Maybe there isn't an enormous demand for
> ubiquitous wifi ... maybe broadband cellphone access will take care
> of such demand as there is.

It does.  Furthermore, as I tried to detail in my post, there are
_huge_management_ issues with massive, distributed WiFi.  Some have
tried to solve that by using 802.1 protocols.  But, frankly, we need
a _real_ 802.11s standard that is still in search of a _real_
submission.



-- 
Bryan J. Smith   Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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     Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution