Wi-Fi Networking News
Wi-Fi Networking News reports nearly daily on all the news associated with wireless networking.
- St. Louis Park May Sue Wi-Fi Provider
The city of St. Louis Park, Minn., finds itself with a network that's incomplete and doesn't meet basic contract requirements, the Star Tribune reports: The for-fee network, being built by ARINC but owned by the city, hasn't fulfilled even the first level of service quality required before additional testing is performed in any of the four quadrants of the network, according to St. Louis Park. The network was supposed to be in full operation by summer, and now after lengthy delays, there's no longer any expected completion date. The firm was the low bidder in part because of its unique reliance on solar power to drive the nodes; that's apparently not the root of the problems. The 45,000 person city has 20,000 households, and has 4,000 people reregistered for service, which likely means about one person per household. This is an incredibly high potential penetration rate, although the city's numbers at the time of the bid award were that they were looking for about 6,100 households (32 percent) to sign up within 12 months. The city claims $300,000 in revenue loss so far due to the delays. Early in the year, residents balked at the first design for the 16-foot poles that would be mounted in hundreds of places around the city, and that led to a two-month hiatus while the infrastructure was redesigned....Copyright ©2007 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.
- EarthLink Spent $20m to Date in Philadelphia
EarthLink tells council via piece of paper it spent $20m on network to date: The entire network was once estimated to cost $20m to build, and somewhere around 75 percent has been activated, although (according to one correspondent who attended the meeting) what that 75 percent means is up in the air--75 percent of area or population? If one recalls, EarthLink and its networking supplier Tropos were once talking about 20 to 25 Wi-Fi nodes per square mile. Tropos as one time charged thousands of dollars per node, although my sources indicate that the wholesale price, especially in volume, is dramatically below that. Even so, double network density increases the cost of finding real estate, rental costs for such, and has all the additional associated per-node and per-cluster costs. The company didn't attend the meeting, sending an unsigned statement and leaving Greg Goldman, the head of the Wireless Philadelphia non-profit that supervises the network and the relationship with EarthLink as the target of councilmanic questioning. (His prepared testimony is online.) Although EarthLink apparently wrote that the network is "substantially complete," that doesn't appear to jibe with the 75 percent number. Goldman said EarthLink had "several thousand" subscribers; WP has 613 participations in their program for free and discounted access. WP has now secured $1m independent of the fees and expenses associated with overseeing the network for digital inclusion programs....Copyright ©2007 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.
- The Neverending Connection: What If Your BlackBerry Works In Flight?
The Associated Press's Anick Jesdanun examines the fear of regaining in-flight connectivity among the jetset: This is a pretty hilarious, almost contrarian article about the reactions some always-on people have about gaining email, BlackBerry, and full Internet access while in flight. Some Type Triple A personalities look forward to more productive work time; others sigh about the last place away from the office getting a cord plugged in....Copyright ©2007 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.
- Other Foot, Meet Shoe: New America Foundation's Report on Philadelphia Wi-Fi
Public policy group releases report critical of Philadelphia Wi-Fi network, but not for reasons you think: Their conclusion is that the city-created non-profit Wireless Philadelphia should have built and owned the network. Long-time readers of this site will recall that I said many times when thinktanks and reports directly and indirectly funded by telecom incumbents made specious, unsupportable statements, that I would equally hold those in favor of municipally funded or authorized networks to the same standard? Okay, then. My main take: The report looks to Philadelphia as a case study of what went wrong in municipal wireless, starting as the premise that public ownership with private operators working as contractors is what was called for by Phila. stakeholders and common sense, and that the non-profit that should have run the network has accomplished little. This view ignores the fiscal realities Phila. and most other cities face, the reasonable (as opposed to unreasonable) criticism raised at the time and that proved justified about putting taxpayer dollars into networks that weren't well understood how to build, and that the non-profit has, despite the long delays and now jeopardized future of the network, achieved some milestones through hard effort. I'll also note that as with the 2005/2006 era anti-muni-wireless reports, the authors of this screed relied on secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary sources for their conclusions. Sources are often quoted or cited from newspaper accounts, or accounts of accounts in which a reporter or blogger (like yours truly) has summarized an opinion or quote read elsewhere. Trusting secondary or more distant sources mean leveraging your point on other people's conclusions or reporting skills, which is intellectually weak. (As a blogger, that's part of my trade, which I leaven with actual interviews, informal conversations, and constant email.) Speaking to everyone would have been overkill, but with some key players (or noting that they declined to be interviewed) would have provided the perspective that only human conversation introduces into ideology. Now onto the details. The thesis: Wireless Philadelphia essentially abrogated its role in supervising the network by handing over control to EarthLink. This doesn't conform to my reading of the documents or what's happened since. WP had no method by which to raise the money necessary to own and operate the network, nor to pay the fees required by other bidders. WP is generally deprecated for failing to achieve goals that this report says were set for it. I haven't followed the digital divide side of things carefully, but I would argue that given three realities, WP had few choices: no money or near-term sources; an offer of a free network; a plan to move money from the no-cost network to WP. How could they turn this down, especially in 2005? The fact that little money flowed through the system doesn't appear to me to be the fault of WP or Philadelphia's leadership. Page 3: "over-reliance on the unverified claims of companies attempting to run municipal networks, can lead to the failure of these initiatives": This is the worst form of couch quarterbacking I have ever seen. There were a lot of problems