The Hiccups of Free Wi-fi for Cities

smooth wombat writes "Several cities around the country are considering implementing free wi-fi for its residents. Currenly, St. Cloud, Florida is the only one that can make that claim. However, the 28,000 residents are still experiencing hiccups in the system more than a month after implementation including being able to see receivers but not being able to connect or connecting at different times with weak signals or not being able to connect at all. As a result, many residents are still paying for monthly landline connections. HP, which has been contracted to build the project and provide customer support, says it is working to resolve the issues by adding more access points to improve signal strength in isolated parts of the city. Despite these issues, HP says that there were only 842 help-line calls out of more than 50,000 user sessions in the first 45 days of service."

Free WiFi AP wiki

[suso]

Heh, just last night there was someone on the mediawiki IRC channel asking if his Free WiFi Lan wiki project [freewlan.org] was a good idea. People from here should go there and give this project a boost. Check it out [freewlan.org].

Ironically, someone asked the guy if his server could take a Slashdotting. From talking to him through email it seems that will will be fine for a comment link.

Sunnyvale, CA has it too

[callipygian-showsyst]

Currenly, St. Cloud, Florida is the only one that can make that claim

BZZZZZZZT Thanks for playing!

Sunnyvale, CA (a city of 115,000 people) has free city-wide WiFi, too.

Re:A large scale project induces hiccups.

[Trigun]

Terribly sorry, I got to the part that said "More than a month after St. Cloud launched what analysts say is the country's first free citywide Wi-Fi network, Lusardi and others in this 28,000-person Orlando suburb are still paying to use their own Internet service providers as dead spots and weak signals keep some residents offline and force engineers to retool the free system." and thought, "Hmm, more than a month, that can't possibly be 24 months."

After reading the article, I found out that it "... launched the network on a trial basis in May 2004 in a new division of town to help give businesses an incentive to relocate. After further exploring the benefits, officials decided to expand it citywide." Which means that it worked well in the trial, and they had issues as they expanded and added users.

Now let's dissect all of that. May 2004, St. Cloud launches test bed. Works. Continue to run testbed.
Sometime between 01/01/06 and 03/24/06, after having to go through committees, raise funding, and implementation of the full scale wi-fi network, they release it to the public. People complain (Which is their nature, and some of them their sole function) that they can't get wireless coverage, or that the access points are maxxed out. When they do connect, it's slow. Some lady at the beach, which has really decent line of sight when compared to, say an apartment building, can use it.

So, after RTFA, I think that I'm still right. But I could be wrong about that. It's been known to happen,

There are a bunch of these

[drewzhrodague]

There are a bunch of hotspot lists, including wireless anarchy [wirelessanarchy.com]. Hell, I even provide a hotspot list [wifimaps.com], but we get ours from people wardriving.

Marquette?

[zip0nada]

Marquette Michigan is one of those cities that DOES have a working WiFi network almost citywide. The Northern Michigan University provides nearly complete WiFi coverage throughout Marquette and plan to complete this coverage soon.