Comments on: Cities deploying Wi-Fi face challenges

Cities already offering Wi-Fi service to residents struggle in the early days to meet users' bandwidth and reliability expectations.

[ORinSF]

Stick to public spaces

Here in San Francisco, the population is general pretty wealthy. I am not sure who exactly is demanding (in a here's-my-money sense) city Wi-Fi.

If the goal is to help poorer residents, it should be designed as such. Offer Wi-Fi in public spaces, like parks and libraries, which are the proper place for city services.

Taxpayer-funded Wi-Fi in business or residential areas is a waste. Nobody is demanding it; otherwise it would have already been built.

[wnew813]

City Wifi

Dunedin Florida has a company that is trying to setup a city wide wifi and had a hard time with the local power company using their power polls. I think it has been resolved and they should be complete in 6 months. The city government gets the service free.

[nextcube]

Robust or inexpensive? There's the rub

Let's face it - when my neighbor's cheap analog 2.4 GHz cordless phone knocks down my WLAN, it's probably a sign that this isn't a city-wide solution. There's too much other stuff going on in the ISM band. Of course, there's no market penetration of any of the other WLAN standards (even 802.11a, which operates in the less crowded 5.8GHz band, but faces propagation problems as a result), so cities looking to implement "cheap" city-wide WLANs are caught - a more robust solution is expensive and has no penetration; the 802.11b/g solution is inexpensive, but not robust. What is it going to cost the city to try to support a city-wide 802.11b/g network that goes down every time someone picks up the phone?

[stigskov]

Technology fitting the mission....

Effectively 3 channels and a fixed power level makes WiFi quite unsuitable for this mission.

WiMAX however, fits that mission. Please refer to CommDesigns excellent acticle:
http://www.commsdesign.com/design_corner/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170100162

[kimocrossman]

San Francisco has gone with Google Earthlink for political reasons

Municipal solutions have not been considered.

Rhere's a lot of hype but no pilots were even required before selecting the top vendor.

Expectations need to be reset and cities need to hold vendors to high standards of privacy.

See my blog for more on the issue

http://www.webnetic.net

[pradeep.vijayakumar]

Bangalore to wait. Pune, Are you ready?

I'm not too sure whether Pune (India) is ready for this. I see similar political and technical problems arising out here too. But having said that, it is good that its getting started in its early stages of technological makeover (bcos there are rarely any big tech communities out here).
And i find, probably this was the reason bangalore was restrained from the choice for implementing Wi-Fi. The user community is as good as the silicon valley (and it is growing at a rapid pace). Considering all this, I think even the internet laws are yet to mature to handle such a kind of open network.