Free ‘Fi, Fo’ Fun!
San Francisco comes that much closer to perfection as two neighborhoods go WiFi. Yup, whole neighborhoods: Fillmore and the Castro - lucky ducks.
Oh, but since it’s me blogging here - you know there’s probably going to be a political angle, and here it is:
On one side are city governments that are considering creating municipal wireless systems to help bridge the digital divide. On the other side is the telecommunications industry, which sees such efforts — funded by tax dollars — as a threat to private businesses.
Information wants to be free, kids. And it’s doing really well just being free, getting freer, and reaching farther. But telcom is a rather large gorilla, so it will be interesting to watch where this goes. And you have a good vantage point here in SF:
Last year, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom unveiled an initiative to blanket all of San Francisco with free Wi-Fi. A feasibility study is under way. The many options include creating a municipally managed Wi-Fi service or using private companies. A report on the matter is expected later this year.
Apparently, Union Square is already WiFi-ed, though I’ve never tried it. Other public square type areas such as the Ferry Building and Civic Center are seen as potential hot zones as well. AnchorFree, the company that is installing the new WiFi zone (tried to link to them, but, ironically, their site seems to be down), is still working out both tech and business model details.
The conflict between free municipal service and economy-stimulating capitalism isn’t unimportant, of course. Some South Bay services offer subscriptions for around $20/month for access all over town - which I’d certainly pay for if instead of my outrageously overpriced Comcast service.
Competition, theoretically, would keep driving down prices anyway. But as anyone with phone service might have noticed, it’s a strange little industry, that telcom. And I’d imagine it’s a hard market to predict given the preferences of consumers. For instance, my first apartment building tested WiFi on several of its floors - mainly just to see how far the signal would travel, how many routers would be needed to reach all floors, etc. Then one day, a survey turned up asking how we liked the service and how much we’d like to pay for it. Well, I’d like to pay nothing for it, of course. Mainly because I know that the relative cost doesn’t really increase per user (additional router boxes and bandwidth aside). They could password protect the signal, sure - but I bet I could find a bored high school sophomore who could overcome that obstacle (and I know if I’m wrong readers and other metbloggers will correct me).
If there are any tech or biz focused readers out there (ha! “if) who could weigh in on the struggle between free and fee ‘Fi, please, comment away . . . .
P.S. L.A.’s got some muni-fi action goin’ on too . . . .
Related posts:
That’s scary that Major Nuisance is supporting the wasteful spending of tax payer dollars on city-wide wi-fi when internet access is already available to the general public for free in any public library, all while MUNI trying to bridge a budget gap and I am still dodging bum feces on Market St.
Well, I hear ya on the Muni problems (i’m still trying to figure out what we as a neighborhood did to warrant the kind of crap N-Judah service lately).
But I don’t think that investing in a more broadly wifi-ed city is a bad thing. Libraries can’t support everyone who might benefit from greater net-access. Libraries have a limited number of terminals (unless you’re saying they are WiFi-ed - I’ll admit my SF library going has been limited to academic contexts) usually with time limits to accomodate the number of people who want to use them.
Really helping people, of course, means getting them computers and not just making WiFi available (which is worthless if you can’t, you know, use it).
Though I don’t know an exact figure, I’d bet that whatever money the city is putting into this study is a very, very small amount in the grand scheme of things.
According to this Chronicle article http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/02/BUG54CI0KM1.DTL
It didn’t cost the city a dime.