Yesterday the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee (this time staffed by Supervisors Bevan Dufty, Jake McGoldrick and Fiona Ma) met and heard concerns from internet providers, activists and wi-fi mavericks about the city’s proposed free wi-fi program. If you didn’t follow along with the live IRC over at Webnetic, you can watch a video of the hearing here (select item 7 for the 5/1/06 meeting), or read the San Francisco Sentinel summary City of San Francisco Wi-Fi alternatives considered. The hearing went well, and I was happy to see Sup. Jake McGoldrick following this issue; in the previous hearing he made the questioning into an exciting Perry Mason-esque cross examination in an attempt to get to the bottom of the secrecy and backroom-dealing atmosphere behind the decision making process. Let’s just say I’d hate to go toe-to-toe with McGoldrick about anything *I* was trying to hide…

The concerns are many; besides privacy, Carlos Rios explained that Earthlink’s proposed implementation would mean free wi-fi for only one in five San Franciscans — the nightmare, of course, is that we’d end up with a situation like what might happen in Portland with their free wi-fi choice, Mountain View startup MetroFi Inc, whose “free” version is ad-driven (read: pummels you with advertising and everything that comes with it) and offers an ad-free version for $19.95. WTF? What’s free about any of that? Local users don’t have good things to say about the service: users of MetroFi’s Bay Area network say the service the company offers is not as reliable as the service that phone and cable companies provide, that they rarely see transfer speeds as high as *half* the advertised speed, and many other major problems. So… wouldn’t it be great if we got free wi-fi and it sucked? That would almost be as embarrassing as having Arnold Schwarzenegger as our Governor. Almost.

But even though local pundits are on the case, there were still a lot of unanswered questions. The Supes are getting educated around the issues (educating people about what they’re getting into is essential here) and the next hearing is scheduled for Friday May 19th, 1pm pst. Here is the agenda and details for the next hearing; you can also watch it on channel 26 or online at SFGTV. I’ll be bugging Webnetic for IRC info/links as the date approaches.

Image via the San Francisco Sentinel. Thanks Kimo!

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