S.F. keeps pushing citywide Wi-Fi

TalkBack 6 of 21:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

Substitution

... will have to be maintained by municipal employees. Then there's the staff to field service calls, the complaints department, the sales department (what good is a service if no one uses it or understands it), purchasing...

Do you have any idea what San Francisco and Philadelphia currently spend on radio connections for city services? They have the same requirements for local repeaters/uplinks, service, purchasing, etc. but due to the relative costs of specialized hardware they're a lot more expensive.

Cities want to be moving to COTS infrastructure, which means ubiquitous wireless networking for everything from police and fire to busses and garbage collection. That change alone will save a bundle on the city budget.

The bulk of the costs are NRE (non-recurring expenses) that don't materially increase with the number of clients. Having a single network to cover the city reduces interference compared to multiple networks. Don't underestimate the reliability concern: when that ambulance tries to upload your EKG to the cardiologist, you don't want it to be blocked by RF interference.

What that means is that the scale issues make this a natural city service.

My personal take is that cities are waking up this time to avoid repeating the mistakes they made by letting private monopolies own the "last mile" on power, telephone, and cable. Communications is as much a basic city service as water, and should be provisioned as such. Let the service providers compete all they like without "owning" the residents.

Posted by: Yagotta B. Kidding   Posted on: 08/18/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Iinfrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now
• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
• Reducing Server Total Cost of Ownership with VMware Virtualization Software VMware VMware virtualization enables customers to reduce their server TCO and ... Download Now