Free San Francisco Wi-Fi project dies
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EarthLink has backed out of a deal to build San Francisco's free citywide Wi-Fi service.
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An ambitious plan to turn  millions of desktop computers into hubs of wireless Internet  access has been shelved after PC makers balked at the price of  the feature, Intel Corp. INTC.O said on Monday.
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After Earthlink and Google scrapped plans to offer wireless in the city, many weren't so sure. But a start-up is promising to finish the job.
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Among the 900 layoffs announced by Earthlink is John Berryman, the vice president in charge of Earthlink's municipal Wi-Fi projects. Under his wing was a high-profile project to blanket San Francisco with wireless connectivity.
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By Dean Kahn, The Bellingham Herald, Wash.  Jun. 8--More local governments are providing free Wi-Fi as a way to attract shoppers and visitors. Even some transit agencies are providing Wi-Fi on buses.
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IT officials from three California cities detailed their experiences Monday with trying to set up municipal wireless networks, efforts that have yielded varying degrees of success.Speaking during the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif., IT executives from Anaheim, San Francisco, and Los Angeles noted development plans for these networks, both for public services and to bridge the digital divide between those with Internet access and those without."Really, it?s been the applications that have been the driving force," said Robb McIntosh, information services manager for Anaheim.The city is in the process of building wireless links for public safety, public works, and other services. EDS runs the city's IT, McIntosh said. Meanwhile, Anaheim's citizen Wi-Fi network, intended for resident access to wireless capabilities, is 70 percent developed, McIntosh said.San Francisco's now-stalled efforts to build citywide wireless links were inspired by the digital divide, said Chris Vein, San Francisco CIO."[Bridging this divide] remains the driving force for us today," Vein said.Plans had called for a mesh network to cover all 49 square miles of the city. EarthLink was supposed to provide the system but that plan did not come to fruition. "Now, we're kind of stepping back, taking a big breath and looking at what we have to do next," Vein said.Anaheim's choice for paying for its citizen wireless network involves selling subscriptions. In San Francisco, payment options such as subscriptions or simply using taxpayer funds are still on the table."We're taking a look at everything," said Vein. "We haven't ruled anything out."Los Angeles also cited digital inclusion as its reason for seeking a wireless network, said Mark Wolf, assistant general manager for the city's Information Technology Agency.Wolf stressed the hurdles in having to provide wireless coverage to a city spanning 464 square miles and extending from the ocean to the mountains. Los Angeles has been doing Wi-Fi on a small basis and has been learning from cities such as Philadelphia and San Francisco. The plan is at a crossroads, Wolf said."It?s a good thing that it's at a crossroads and not cross hairs, in the sites of a gun," said Wolf.?Aside from the altruistic goal of digital inclusion, Los Angeles also is equipping its police force with sophisticated wireless equipment from Motorola. Video capabilities allow police to see a scene before arriving; other features include license plate-scanning, mobile digital cameras, and facial recognition systems.In other talks during Monday's general session at the conference, Padmarsee Warrior, CTO of Motorola, stressed that multiple wireless standards such as Wi-Fi and the newly approved WiMax standard will continue to coexist. While Wi-Fi is limited to covering hot spots, WiMax is good for covering large areas."The right kind of debate for the industry to have is what combination of these technologies provides true value to public safety, to governments, to municipalities, to consumers, to enterprise, to corporations, etc., as the world becomes mobile. And the world is becoming mobile," Warrior said.Speaker Esme Vos, co-founder of MuniWireless.com, emphasized applications for wireless. These included making wireless capabilities available on public transit so people can get their work done while commuting, traffic management, and energy management. Cities such as Riverside, Calif., Tuscon, Ariz., and Milpitas, Calif., are utilizing wireless to provide city services, she said.With cities doubling in size every five years but without the ability to double the number of municipal employees, cities are looking to leverage wireless, Vos said.
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An ambitious plan to blanket the city with wireless broadband Internet will be shelved because it is too costly and too few residents would use it, Chicago officials said Tuesday.
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The city's CIO said that it is just taking a breather while it figures how it can build a citywide wireless network that can provide free access to all.
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The sun came out for EarthLinks&#39; Philadelphia Wi-Fi network on Thursday even as prospects for its San Francisco project remain shrouded in fog.
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Wireless networking startup Meraki plans to deliver free wireless Internet access, supported by advertising, across San Francisco by the end of the year, it announced Friday.
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CHICAGO - Plans to blanket cities across the nation with low-cost or free wireless Internet access are being delayed or abandoned because they are proving to be too costly and complicated.
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(InfoWorld) - San Francisco is going to kick the tires of an alternative to theÂ citywide Wi-Fi planÂ from EarthLink and Google. The budget analyst of the City and County of San Francisco agreed on Monday to study to financial feasibility of a wireless network paid for and owned by the city. The agency expects to finish its report by December, a representative said at a meeting Monday of the Board of Supervisors' Government Audit and Oversight Committee. The city's Wi-Fi plan and the process of developing it has come under fire from several quarters, not least from some members of the Board of Supervisors. Supervisor Jake McGoldrick formally requested the feasibility study after criticizing the way in which the administration of Mayor Gavin Newsom settled on theÂ EarthLink-Google plan. It calls for a network to be built at no cost to the city and owned by the two service providers. "It really got rammed and jammed and fast-tracked," McGoldrick said in April. If the city owned the network, he believes it would have more control overÂ issues such as user privacyÂ and prompt upgrading of the technology. The analyst's plan to deliver the report by December satisfied McGoldrick, who talked with representatives of the agency at Monday's meeting. The city also expects to wrap up its negotiations with EarthLink and Google in early December, said Brian Roberts, a senior policy analyst for the city's Department of Telecommunications and Information Services. The department has no position on the plan for the feasibility study, he said: The budget analyst's report will give the supervisors more information to decide whether to go with the EarthLink-Google deal, he said. Also Monday, a nonprofit organization said a city-owned network would pay for itself in just over four years. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) released the results of a feasibility study report that was sought by Media Alliance, an Oakland, California, group that has pushed for broader access to technology. ILSR envisioned San Francisco building the network for an initial capital investment of about $10 million, to be repaid over five years from services revenue. The city would create a nonprofit body to sell access to the network to service providers wholesale. Upgrades would cost about $9 million over ten years, the group said. The plan is similar to onesÂ advocated in some other cities, such as that of the Boston Wireless Task Force. ILSR said its estimates, which in part assume that 10 percent of households and businesses would become paid subscribers at about $15 per month, were conservative. A better plan would be for the city to expand its current 43-mile fiber network to eventually reach all homes, while deploying wireless in certain areas in the meantime, ILSR said. Fiber costs more to deploy but less to maintain. The city didn't provide enough information for a complete analysis of this plan, ILSR said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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(InfoWorld) - Silicon Valley's municipal wireless project is one of the most ambitious ever attempted, but good things take time -- more than proponents thought, in this case. Organizers signed a letter of intent with a group of vendors, including CiscoÂ and IBM, last year to build a 1,500-square-mile network. At the time, the group expected a rollout beginning in January or February of this year. The fact that not even a pair of test networks is on the ground yet is a testament to the scale and complexity of the plan, according to Seth Fearey, vice president and CEO of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, which is pushing the plan. If the system takes shape as planned, it will let travelers stay connected throughout a trip from San Francisco's southern city limits to Gilroy, south of San Jose. Wi-Fi may be just one of eight technologies used in the project. The high-tech region is reaching high while municipal wireless is going through a reality check. Last year, a vendor dropped out of a project in Sacramento after expressing concern over a free ad-supported economic model, and in April,Â EarthLink scaled back its municipal wireless activityÂ to focus on existing cities and major opportunities. A high-profile plan for nearby San Francisco is embroiled in a political fight because some leaders think it is a bad deal for the city. The Silicon Valley network would cover more than 40 municipalities across mountains, valleys and urban and suburban areas, with 2.4 million residents. The nonprofit Joint Venture group formed the Wireless Silicon Valley Task Force to spearhead the project, and last September it chose Silicon Valley Metro Connect to build and run it. Along with Cisco as equipment supplier and IBM as system integrator, Metro Connect includes high-tech nonprofit SeaKay and Azulstar. No tax dollars can be spent on the estimated $100 million project. Metro Connect envisions a "layer cake" ofÂ perhaps eight wireless technologies, according to Fearey. Details are still being worked out, but they may include the following: *Â Wi-Fi for central areas of cities *Â WiMax mobile broadband at 2.5GHz for less populated areas *Â a public-safety network at 4.9GHz *Â DSRC (Dedicated Short-Range Communications) for vehicle communications at 5.9GHz *Â systems for environmental sensors and machine-to-machine communications The task force is still negotiating with Metro Connect on a "model agreement" to form the basis of deals with each municipality or agency, which is almost finished, Fearey said. Sticking points include details of prices, terms of service, minimum coverage, and privacy, he said. "It's in their hands as to when we can get this going," Fearey said. Azulstar has been the lead negotiator for Metro Connect for four to six weeks since it was designated the network owner and operator, according to Noa Eisenberg, Azulstar's vice president of marketing. The parties have made a lot of progress in the past several weeks, and Azulstar expects a model agreement to be finished in the very near future, she said. Initial forecasts of deployment starting in February may have been overly optimistic, said Glenn Loo, CIO of Palo Alto, who sits on a committee with other city government representatives working on the project. Palo Alto will host one of the test networks where all the technologies will be tried out. Meeting the needs of the many entities involved and planning coverage across the region's terrain have been hard, he said. But Loo thinks the Palo Alto test network will be up before the end of July and the main network approved and deployed in some cities by year's end. One municipal wireless consultant sees more work and delays ahead unless backers change course. They should have tackled the project like a corporate IT department and started with a few key applications to build up momentum before adding other features, said Craig Settles, an independent consultant who has not worked with the Silicon Valley team. "Someone's got to be willing to say, 'We can achieve the vision, but maybe we should simplify the initial steps,'" Settles said. "You can't sell this much complexity to the average politician."
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The MIT thesis-turned-company wants to build Wi-Fi networks in India. It's starting in San Francisco.
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Intel Corporation has decided not to enable the wireless access-point function in its new Intel &quot;Grantsdale&quot; chip. A company spokesman confirmed that Intel has decided to phase
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Chicago has scrapped its ambitious plan to blanket the city with Wi-Fi coverage, saying it would be too expensive.
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Many U.S. cities are finding their Wi-Fi projects costing more and drawing less interest than expected, leading to worries  of failure, resulting in millions of wasted tax dollars or grants when there had been roads to build and crime to fight