SF Wifi More Than Flipping a Switch

An anonymous reader writes "News.com is carrying a story looking at the costly rollout of the Google/EarthLink SF Wifi project." From the article: "EarthLink said it expects the project to run to between $6 million and $8 million in initial costs, which include attaching radios and receivers to utility poles throughout the city. Within 10 years it expects the whole network, complete with upgrades and maintenance, to cost about $15 million. Finer financial details of the project haven't been made public, but the plan calls for EarthLink and Google to contribute to the initial cost of building the network. It's not clear what the split between the two companies will be. Once the network is built, Google will pay EarthLink for access to the network on a wholesale basis. In order to make access free to people in San Francisco, Google will use revenue generated from local advertisements to pay for access to the EarthLink network."

Re:That's unfortunate...

[NittanyTuring]

In about 10 years you're going to be able to buy single wireless access points from Best Buy that will cover the size of the city and it's bandwidth needs for about 50 USD.

Not going to happen given how the FCC manages spectrum and transmission power.

Good point. Technology changes rapidly, not the laws of physics. For an access point to have that kind of capability, it would dump pretty high-power transmissions into the EM spectrum. While it is possible that the technology to do that will improve, by becoming smaller and cheaper, the issue of regulation still remains. It would likely cause tons of interference for those near the transmission point, and would possibly even pose a health hazard. Notice that in the evolution of wireless technology, bandwidth improves at a much higher rate than transmission range.

Also, it's a fact that wireless broadcast technology isn't going to look like that. By that logic, television broadcast towers should soon be the size of a car antenna, and cell phone towers should soon be the size of a fingernail. These technologies don't seem to be moving in that direction.

Good luck

[chill]

WiFi B/G (the 2.4 GHz spectrum) has only 3 non-overlapping channels: 1,6,11. Linksys sets their equipment to default to 6. I'm not sure about other vendors.

Where I live, in a small town in Idaho, there are three wireless networks in my range. Mine and two neighbors. There are half-a-dozen downtown and maybe two dozen more around town. NONE of them, except for mine and one neighbor's are secured at all. 90% of them have the SSID of "linksys" and are sitting on channel 6, stomping on each other.

Connectivity from even two houses down is abysmal and frequently you will see your connection hop from one to another, and I don't mean seamlessly, either.

How is Google/Earthlink going to handle all the people who already have WLANs? Are they just going to pick a channel like 1 or 11 and say "sorry, we're here with the strongest signal"? I'd be strongly tempted to switch my personal stuff to the 5 GHz band (Wifi-A), but that wouldn't be cheap as I'd have to refit a Tivo, two X-Boxes and 3 PCs.

WiFi is a freaking mess and can be a source of no end of issues. I wonder just how Google is going to deal with all that.

Re:Inconceivable?! I don't think this word means..

[chill]

You can add the ubiquitous coverage in airports, marinas, hotels, etc. that have been in place for years and years.

Airports are closed environments and rarely will you find an overlapping network. This is why they actually work. I have no experience with marinas. I have lots with hotels, who go to great lenghts to install LOTS of overlapping access points to just plain drown out all the external signals from other hotels, truck stops, etc. They still have issues and wifi access at many hotels is a royal PITA.

There are hundreds if not thousands of network engineers that do this for a living and are good at their work.

Yeah, I know. I'm one of them, which is one reason I raise the question.

Of course consumer equipment set up by idiots and designed for indoor use won't provide a citywide network.

I never claimed it would. I claimed they would have to compete/deal with all the interference from those that already exist and that all that crappy home equipment will now have a big signal stomping on it and create even more headaches for those home users.

You might need to change what channel you use on your tivo or whatnot. But you'd have to do that anyway if a neighbor gets a new toy.

I did, to 11. I also went and changed one neighbor's connection to use channel 1. I ignored the other neighbor since his was on 6. I secured (WEP/WPA, MAC restrictions, DHCP & netmask tuned down to provide no more than 6 IP addresses, changed SSIDs, etc.) my neighbor's and mine (WiFi-G only as an extra precaution). This helped a great deal, but it took some effort and education on the part of my neighbor.

My situation also works because I live out in the middle of nowhere. I have a friend who lives in a hi-rise apartment in Chicago. He just bought a directional wifi antenna and was telling me that from his apartment he can see almost 400 unprotected wifi access spots. He could hop from one to another every day for a year and never have to pay for a connection again! He was curious as to why he was having so much interference

I have no doubt it will work, but I also think it will -- at best -- provide a minimum level of usability with a bit of a pain threshold. I also think there will be a plethora of opportunities for premium service providers.

  -Charles

What would be really nice...

[jchernia]

Is if they could get it on Caltrain like they have it on the ACE. It's not a lot of square miles.