[Rooftops] Re: [msgs] City of Boston WI-FI "summit" Thurs @ Museum of Science (9am - 1pm) (fwd)

[Jim Youll]

I believe you're dramatically over-simplifying both the problem and the 
"solution" and forgetting the maintenance overhead that then has to be 
dealt with as well, in a city that historically has had troubles taking 
care of the street lights without the fancy attachment.

I don't see your basis in decreeing that this sort of thing should be 
publicly funded or any rationale for why that's necessary. People can 
get Internet access right now for $10 a month. My brother, in 
Cleveland, with a couple of uni degrees, good job and a nice house, is 
definitely not cut off from the world with his puny dialup connection, 
so I'm not sure why it's so essential to attempt to deliver broadband 
through brick walls and around corners to people who apparently, by 
your description, don't even know why they want a computer right now... 
much less to parks where it's sometimes not even safe to carry an iPod, 
or why such a thing would even be useful.

it's yet another instance of technologies and money interests pushing 
technology as a solution to a social problem that they don't 
understand.

The last go-round, that project in Boston, deteriorated into make-work 
for the promoters. I fail to see why this one would be any different.




On May 17, 2005, at 12:37 AM, Stephen Ronan wrote:

>
> On Mon, 16 May 2005, Jim Youll wrote:
>
>> I have hard time getting behind initiatives like this because with 
>> rare exception:
>
> I'm not sure I know just what you mean by "initiatives like this". 
> Thus far about all we we have to show for the Boston initiative is a 
> draft analysis (not a plan for the future) to be released this week 
> and an opportunity on May 19th to discuss it.
>
> Perhaps next there'll subsequently be a Mayoral task force to develop 
> a plan. But that's not clear at this point.
>
> But maybe you mean initiatives like putting up streetlights and 
> keeping them lit, putting in water mains and delivering fresh H2O to 
> the citizens (including free fountains in the park), paving streets 
> and keeping them more or less clear of snow, attaching a couple dozen 
> WiFi mesh nodes per sq mile to lamposts and connecting a few of them 
> as gateways to the Internet, maintaining a sewer system, or 
> establishing libraries.
>
>> 	- they aren't designed to be self-sustaining and tend to operate 
>> with an infinite subsidy
>
> Take streetlights and libraries... how would you prefer they be funded?
>
>> 	- they're deployed with too little forethought and too much 
>> excitement
>
> Well, I'm guessing you weren't up late last night reading "Fast & 
> Easy: The Future of WiFi & Beyond In the City of Los Angeles" just 
> recently issued by the Mayor's WiFi & Beyond Executive Advisory Panel. 
> That panel, which included representatives of SBC, Verizon, Comcast, 
> and Time Warner, managed to attain a majority consensus (with some 
> dissenting by the cablecos) for such excitement as this:
>
> "Personalized Broadband Services: Even though the provision of access 
> to broadband services at municipal facilities is a necessary first 
> step in the achievement of our proposed mission, within the space of 
> five years we believe most people would not want to travel to a 
> central lcation to gain access to broadband networks. Fortunately, the 
> inherently lower cost structure of [WiFi and Beyond] WAB technologies 
> makes it possible for the City to begin to address this issue in ways 
> that were outside its capacity in the past. <i>While some aspects of 
> the Digital Divide such as devices, service performance, and education 
> are beyond the scope of this panel's work, in the time span of five 
> years, we believe the City should also have a plan that will address 
> this issue of convenienet access to the Net for all its residents, 
> businesses and visitors that takes into account both public and 
> private activities.</i> It can help address these other factors by 
> empowering community based non-profit stakeholders and leveraging 
> grant opportunities to undertake such a role."
>
> Well, if that's not more than enough excitement for one day, one can 
> read the first paragraph under Financing, which makes a bold call for 
> development of a "Decision-Making Calculus".
>
> Or, if you prefer, there's the citywide vaporware WAN being discussed 
> once in a while since way back when in Cleveland.
>
>
>> 	- they seem to forget that people don't use laptops in parks, and 
>> won't, and maybe oughtn't, for a number of reasons
>
>
> I'm somewhat sympathetic to that perspective. But perhaps the folks 
> pictured here have better backlit screens or eyesight than I do: 
> http://www.bryantpark.org/amenities/wireless.php
> I have little interest in combining laptops and direct sunlight. But 
> when I get off the bus in NYC in the dark of the evening, Bryant Park 
> seems to me like it could be a pretty good place to catch up on email 
> now that the EasyInternet joint around 42nd street has closed.
>
>> 	- there's nothing magical about wireless connections that "bridges 
>> the digital divide"
>
> My first home was a housing development that the last page of this 
> week's NY Times Magazine reminds me consisted, together with its 
> neighbor development, of "110 apartment buildings, from 13 to 15 
> stories each, housing more than 25,000 people on the equivalent of 27 
> Manhattan blocks." If there's another way to bring ubiquitous 
> broadband accessibility to folks living there as inexpensively as WiFi 
> could do it, that other system also to my mind has some magical 
> qualities to it. But it sure would take quite a while to run MS 
> Windows Antispyware (Beta) and then AntiVir consecutively on all the 
> machines there after upgrading a bunch of them from Win 98 to Win 98 
> service pack whatever and then from IE 5 to IE 6 so that the Linksys 
> adapters could install since they need at least IE 5.5 and the newer 
> Cisco ones wouldn't install at all with earlier Windows than 2K. Which 
> may be the kind of issue you're quite correctly alluding to.
>
>> 	- they're pushed by self-interested vendors chasing a permanent 
>> money-stream
>> I would sure like to know what BTS Partners stands to gain from this 
>> event, considering that their business is the design and deployment 
>> of networks.
>
> Not to mention that they list Verizon as a prime partner and Verizon 
> has not been neutral to municipal WiFi efforts. FWIW my initial brief 
> impression is that the chap who seems to be leading their effort on 
> the study has a genuine enthusiasm for serving the public well with an 
> independent study and that Verizon wasn't providing intimate early 
> counsel on its development. And BTS is
> not charged with developing a plan, but rather with describing current 
> capacities and delineating some potential models (such as those that 
> have been consistently outlined already elsewhere).
>
>> Another of the sponsors is Boston WIreless Advocacy Group (BostonWAG) 
>> whose founder is Michael Oh, who can himself be often heard promoting 
>> the Newbury Open Net as a means of advertising his computer services 
>> business, Tech Superpowers.
>
> Michael is one of three founders, the others don't have any related 
> business connection that I know of. I've attended a bunch of the 
> group's meetings; it seems thus far to operate by consensus among 
> those of us who show up, and it's clear that Michael's interest in the 
> potential of WiFi stretches way beyond his business interests. I 
> suspect you and he would agree a lot with each other, probably more 
> than with me about the need for a deliberate carefully planned 
> approach.
>
>> Confusingly, BostonWAG seems to be advocating simple open access 
>> points [10] like the access point in my living room, something that's 
>> very different from the promise to paint an entire 3D city with 
>> high-speed data to solve decades of division between poor and rich 
>> people. BostonWAG also has stake a claim to a bigger mission of 
>> collecting wireless best and worst practices, but so far the website 
>> only shows about 10 reviews of coffee shops offering wireless 
>> Internet access... that's not quite the same thing, and a real 
>> understanding of best and worst practices may require empirical data 
>> that simply do not exist at this early point.
>
> It's a small new organization with a budget of something in the order 
> of zero dollars and as many cents. And it has done quite a bit already 
> all things considered, including holding a very lively preliminary 
> forum at the Boston Public Library a few weeks back. I'd encourage you 
> to come to its next Meetup. And drop by and say hello at my office if 
> you're ever near Broadway and Lee. Or perhaps I'll see you at the 
> Summit bright and early Thursday morning at the Museum of Science 
> (they'll have free WiFi, fortunately, which'll make it easier for some 
> of us to attend).
>
> G'night,
>
> [...]
>
>   - Steve
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