Alan Sondheim on Tue, 19 Apr 2005 19:15:19 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> pulling the plug on WiFi |
This article was forwarded to me by Gerald Jones. In Brooklyn, I've got WiFi and anyone can use it as far as I'm concerned. A block away on Bergen is a publicly advertised hotspot. You sit on the curb or a brownstone stoop and you're on. Wifi is still obviously for the wealthy - PDAs w/access are expensive and laptops are really impractical if you're on the run. But eventually one should have information available everywhere. And for free. And for those who want it from those who want to provide it. It's a no-brainer except for the corporate media fascists who want to drag the last drop of blood out of the body politic. - Alan ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 21:29:30 -0700 (PDT) To: Alan <sondheim@panix.com> Subject: pulling the plug on WiFi This appeared a few days after we spoke on the phone: Miami Herald Posted on Sun, Apr. 17, 2005 Political hacks may pull plug on WiFi cities Hollywood's witty nod to a leisurely future -- a WiFi beach -- just looks like another commie plot to the Luddites running the show up in Tallahassee. Legislation moving through the House and the Senate would snuff out wireless and broadband networks created by forward-looking cities in Florida. High-speed computer access would be safely returned to the whim of Verizon, BellSouth and other corporate broadband carriers. Private companies, not a bunch of renegade city commissions, will once again decide when, if ever, private citizens get this fancy broadband stuff. HOT-WIRED NETWORKS Hollywood has already installed a downtown wireless network and last week announced plans for a hot zone along the beachfront. Orlando has a similar WiFi network downtown. The legislation would essentially shut them down. Cities, trying to barge their way into the brave new world, would be reeled back into the old world. The effect in smaller Central Florida cities could be daunting. The city government in St. Cloud, dismayed by a lack of commercial broadband service, established a downtown wireless network last year. Gainesville, Quincy, Monticello and Tallahassee have their own city-run networks. Winter Springs, Port Orange, Casselberry and New Smyrna Beach have plans to go broadband. City leaders, complaining about a lack of service from commercial carriers, say their cities must have broadband to stay competitive. Leesburg opened access to a 141-mile fiber optic network to all of Lake County in 2001. Telecommunications economist George V. Ford of Applied Economic Studies in Tampa released a study this week showing Lake County's hot-wired economy has since expanded at twice the rate of comparable counties without broadband. Ford told me, ``In nearly every case, these cities first went to the private companies and asked for broadband. And they were told no. There were cities like Quincy, which built a business park but couldn't get a private carrier to provide broadband. So the city did it itself. ''The leaders in these communities know that if they don't have broadband, they'd become ghost towns,'' he said. Ford's study was funded by the Florida Municipal Electric Association, which opposes the pending anti-broadband bills. FMEA knows the next generation of broadband will be accessed through the power grid -- broadband via the electric wall plug. But if a government broadband prohibition passes, that would kill such a possibility, at least for cities that provide electrical service to their residents. DEATH SENTENCE The broadband legislation wouldn't precisely outlaw city-owned networks. Rather they would give private companies the right of first refusal, make cities wait months or years while the companies made up their minds, mandate studies, hearings and taxes, bar city networks from going outside their municipal borders and keep them from adding new customers. All adding up to a death sentence. Similar bills, mostly written by phone company lobbyists, are pending in 10 other states. Supporters complain city services amount to unfair government competition for phone companies -- an ironic supposition, at least in Florida where telephone carriers raked in $83.7 million in federal subsidies last year. It's almost as if our state legislators are blissfully unaware of our floundering status in the high-tech world. The U.S. proportion of citizens wired to broadband has now fallen to 13th in the world. And what passes for broadband in the United States would not be tolerated in, say, South Korea, where 70 percent of the population is wired into a system far faster, with far greater capacity. But our providers have discovered that protective legislation is a hell of a lot cheaper than fiber-optic cable. The Luddites in Tallahassee just ask: ``Why Fi?'' # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net