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

[Jim Youll]

If you want to bring WiFi to people, make it legal and safe to share 
connections, and then give people the ability to make money from 
running their own tiny neighborhood micro-sized access points... this 
takes away the profit motives for the noisiest players in these 
activities, and thus hasn't been considered in any of these citywide 
corporate-sponsored projects to my knowledge as no über-designer 
organization is required to build the network, since it's already 
there.

The ridiculous top-down approach they're toying with tries to 
custom-fit expensive (yes, expensive) wireless signals into every nook 
and cranny such that the rats in the subways could chatter away all 
night on tiny little voip phones...  I also don't see the point of the 
survey. Surely the "enthusiasm" will be used to bolster the cause, but 
what useful information could come from a small, self-selected audience 
unfamiliar with what it will take to roll out something of the scope 
that is being discussed? Of course everyone wants WiFi!

Important question -- why have so many companies - with plenty of money 
- gone into this space and failed? Don't say "salaries". Even community 
projects need marketing, support and staffing, especially on the scale 
of what has just been proposed.

This looks like another expensive experiment carried out for the 
benefit of technology lovers and technology companies at the expense of 
the disadvantage populations it's supposed to serve.


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

> 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.