[IP] more on more on San Francisco receives more than 24 Wi-Fi bids
Begin forwarded message:
From: Brett Glass <brett@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 4, 2005 3:27:27 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx, Ip Ip <ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on more on San Francisco receives more than 24
Wi-Fi bids
At 12:23 PM 10/4/2005, Glen Fleishman wrote:
Kenneth_Mayer@xxxxxxxx on 10/4/05 at 2:05 PM wrote:
Dave, something that occurred to me as we move towards a society of
open wi-fi within the cities. What are they going to consider with
blocking inappropriate stuff? Everyone is going to ask? Who will
govern
this and decide what is good and what is not? Also, what happens when
someone starts to down load torrents on their laptop, the speeds they
are talking about are a lot faster than dial up? Anyone know of
anything?
The big issue is how the contract is written and what entity is
actually operating and in charge of the network. Before Philadelphia,
most municipal networks weren't arm's length: as far as I can tell,
fiber and wireless alike were being built as city/town projects with
sometimes private vendors doing the initial contracting and sometimes
ongoing maintenance.
As a wireless ISP ourselves, LARIAT.NET has proposed a model in which
the municipality provides the infrastructure and some localized content
(e.g. city guides, announcements, etc.) but multiple ISPs furnish users
with access to the outside world.
In the model we envision, each provider would be free to use any
business
model it liked -- advertising-supported, subscription, pay-as-you-go,
etc. They'd pay for maintenance of the system according to the share of
the bandwidth they used, and would be responsible for monitoring for
abuse. The ISP which admitted the unthrottled Bit Torrent user or the
massive repository of illegally copied music or "warez" to the
network would be on the hook for the bandwidth and responsible for
enforcing an acceptable use policy. This would keep such matters out of
government hands as much as possible.
In short, we envision municipal Wi-Fi not as competition for commercial
providers but rather as a way of enabling them via public infrastructure
-- in the same way that public roads make it easier for everyone from
delivery services to plumbers to reach their customers.
This sort of public/private partnership is healthy. One which favors one
provider to the exclusion of others, or undercuts all of them by giving
away what they sell to make a living, is not.
--Brett Glass
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