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

[Trevor Schroeder]

On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 10:31:23AM -0400, spiegel at media.mit.edu wrote:

> This isn't about a technology issue, and no one stood up there and said 
> that. This is a community issue. Its about helping those on the wrong 
> side of the Digital Divide learn and help themselves, and giving them 
> both the trainingh and the resources to do it.

I was there on behalf of the Computer Clubhouse and had a couple of folks
from the Boys & Girls Clubs there to think about it from a community
perspective.  I agree, it was very disappointing.

The focus was pretty heavily on the technical issues and a *little* bit on
the economics.

Some thoughts I had:

  - Providing network access is only one part of the question.  Access to
    computers is obviously just important.

  - Panelists kept talking over and over about how we need to have
    symmetric channels to allow people to be content creators and
    publishers as if that were the sole barrier.  For these folks the
    desire to create and disseminate is so strong that they don't realize
    that others need motivation to understand *why* or that they even
    *can* create stuff.  People find $300 for game consoles, that money
    could just as easily buy a computer, but why choose one over the
    other?  If people are given access without support in using it to its
    fullest potential, it will simply become a carrier for Xbox Live or
    Launch.com.  The trend towards commercialization/consumerization of
    Internet access has been towards asymmetric delivery because most
    people aren't content creators.  We need to change this, but just
    giving a symmetric channel doesn't do it.

  - The panelists had their Wi-Fi blinders on.  Some made nods towards UWB
    and software radio, but ultimately the focus was far too narrow.  The
    beauty of Wi-Fi is its low equipment and marginal costs.  If you just
    need a small standalone network or to add wireless to an existing
    wired-infrastructure, it's CHEAP.  That's great.  It makes it very
    easy for existing institutions (the so-called MUSHes) and technical
    individuals to provide free or possibly low-cost access should they
    desire.  (There's the classic study that shows billing makes it way
    more expensive than just giving it away.)

    But when talking about universal coverage, it's a completely different
    question.  Wi-Fi is not the dominant wireless standard, cellular is.
    There are data cellular offerings already and they have far better
    coverage than any unified wi-fi network today.  If you build a unified
    wi-fi network, you have all the problems that cellular companies have:
    wide-area infrastructure, towers, redundancy, billing, etc.
    Basically, the cost of the AP is only a small piece of the pie and
    that becomes the only difference between you and a cellular operator
    when looking at a full city-scale wi-fi deployment on purpose-built
    infrastructure.

    If you want full-scale wireless coverage, it seems best to work with
    the players who already have the infrastructure to support it.  Do you
    think you can go head-to-head against Verizon?  All they have to do is
    add access points to their existing stations and they can even offer
    wi-fi.  Those carriers are geared up to offer coverage if it can be
    shown to be economically feasible on the scales at which they operate.

    Given this, the best suggestion I heard was that the City should focus
    on facilitating individual or private efforts, giving access to
    utility poles, facilitating interoperation, etc. and stay out of the
    ISP biz themselves.  This will allow wi-fi to flourish where it works
    best: at the low-cost margins where large-scale providers have a hard
    time turning a profit.  This doesn't resolve the "digital divide" (I
    hate that term) question, but perhaps we need targeted solutions for
    that.  The nice (?) thing is that low-income populations tend to be
    pretty geographically defined, so if the City finds that those areas
    are falling behind in wireless access (as they are already), it could
    provide service (either directly or through a grant or contract to
    another provider) to those specific areas without getting into the
    mess that is full city-scale service provision.  The Boston Main
    Streets wireless initiative is actually a good example of this.

    If these providers want to link up and charge through a common billing
    system, that's fine, the City just needs to stay out of the way.

So why didn't I say this all yesterday?  Frankly, I was too disappointed.
It seemed pretty clear that the folks up on the stage had very different
agenda and I felt like what I had to say didn't even figure into their
vision.  So let them have it, but I think they're far wide of mark.