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

[spiegel@media.mit.edu]

Hey Jim,

I need to jump in here to correct a few things. As a non-profit in NYC 
(and someone who has a good deal of respect for your opinion), I must 
say that much of what you claim in your original email is groundless, 
and worse, some of it falls victim to the same illogical conclusions 
that the industry funded "independent" reports put out by the New 
Millenium Research Council (NMRC).

I don't have time to go into detail, but a few things:

1) Muni Wi-Fi or Broadband isn't for every community, but each community 
should have the freedom to decide if it makes sense for them.

2) Quite a lot of New Yorkers (and non-New Yorkers) make use of our 
hotspots in the parks of Manhattan. In fact, in aggregate, many 
thousands of people each month use the 11 parks that are "lit up" 
through the work of NYCwireless and others. We see lots of use even in 
the winter (though it is much less than in the warmer months). Also, 
public space exists indoors as well as out in NYC, as it does in Boston. 
So your "people don't use the outdoor hotspots" claim is in fact 
verifiably groundless. :)

3) There is an enormous amount of forethough that goes into 
muni-networks. Philly, for example, spent 2 years researching this. 
Other cities convene panels of stakeholders and produce reports on 
exactly what should happen (see SF and LA, among others).

4) It is true that Wi-Fi alone doesn't bridge the Digital Divide, but it 
is a part of the solution. See: 
http://www.nycwireless.net/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=11 for a 
partial discussion of this.

5) All of the muni-networks that are either in planning or in operation 
DO NOT have infinite subsidies. In fact, many operate on limited 
government loans that are paid back in full and then some. See: 
http://www.freepress.net/docs/mb_telco_lies.pdf and 
http://www.freepress.net/docs/mb_white_paper.pdf

6) These initiatives are often pushed by communities and constituencies. 
Though there are private companies that are pushing muni-networks, these 
companies base their statements in fact, not the fiction that is put 
forth by those companies (telco's in particular) that come down against 
them.

7) NewburyOpen.net is a great company. Mike Oh (I know him personally) 
is a great friend of social service, and though he justifies his 
business involvement with this work as gaining visibility for Tech 
Superpowers, I'm sure he would do this even if there were no business 
justification at all. He believes (as we all do) in the power of 
technology to help overcome social divide issues.

So, I would recommend you take a look at some of the linked documents. 
And since I know you are actually interested in helping the community, I 
would recommend you get involved and ensure that what Boston decides to 
do with its muni-wi-fi actually will aid in some of the social divide 
issues above. :)

Dana Spiegel
Executive Director
NYCwireless
dana at nycwireless.net
www.nycwireless.net
+1 917 402 0422


Jim Youll wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
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