Pesky walls and roofs may perpetuate "the digital divide"
On the Chron.com City Hall blog today, Alexis Grants links to a New York Times story that discusses one of the big problems with the type of citywide wifi network that Mayor White hopes will be built by Earthlink:
The impulse behind these projects is noble. It’s a shame, however, that lots of street lamps and lots of dollars — a typical deployment in an urban setting will run $75,000 to $125,000 a square mile, just to install the equipment — do not really solve the last-mile problem.
If you’re sitting with your laptop at an outside cafe, you’ll be happy with the service. But if you happen to be at home, you realize that service to the doorstep is not enough: you still need to buy equipment to bolster the signal and solve the “last mile plus 10 more yards” problem — that is, getting coverage indoors.
Wi-Fi signals do not bend, and you usually can’t get much of a useful bounce from them, either. Because Wi-Fi uses unlicensed bands of the radio spectrum, by law it must rely on low-power transmitters, which reduce its ability to penetrate walls. Travel-round-the-world shortwave, this ain’t.
Trying to cover a broad area with Wi-Fi radio transmitters set atop street lights brings to mind a fad of the 1880s: attempts to light an entire town with a handful of arc lights on high towers. But overeager city boosters around the country soon discovered that shadows obscured large portions of their cities, and the lighting was not as useful as had been expected. Municipal Wi-Fi on streetlamps, another experiment with top-down delivery, may run a similarly short-lived — and needlessly expensive — course.
Unfortunately, the story is behind the Times Select firewall, but here is a reprint from another newspaper.
The Chronicle's own Dwight Silverman experienced the problem when he tried to use the municipal wifi network in Corpus Christi. The signal didn't penetrate his parents' home, and he had to stand outside to connect.
Grant's story in the Chronicle today indicates that Earthlink is downplaying the problem:
A wireless modem or a device called a repeater, which enhances the indoor signal, usually will solve the problem at a cost of about $100.
About one-third of users need one of these to prevent spotty service, Berryman said, so EarthLink provides one free to subscribers who sign a one-year contract. The modem EarthLink provides now can be used only for one computer, but the device the company expects to distribute to Houston users will repeat the signal for several computers.
Ultimately, that's a clumsy, unsatisfying workaround that adds expense to the provider and inconvenience to the end user. Requiring a one-year service commitment for the needed repeater also makes the terms of service much like those for the cheapest tiers of DSL service (if slightly more expensive). The one-year commitment may also hinder efforts to "bridge the digital divide." But maybe the city can lean on Earthlink to provide the repeaters free of charge to poor people.
Thank goodness the city is contracting out with a third party to handle this effort, since it is Earthlink's capital at risk if the boondoggle fails miserably because most people who would pay for broadband (customers!) actually don't want to stand outside holding their laptops. But who knows -- by 2009 (when the buildout is scheduled to be complete), maybe better technology will make the notion of ubiquitous municipal broadband a little less farfetched.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/21/07 12:12 AM | Print |
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