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municipal
This page considers the municipal wifi movement.
It covers -
introduction
Particular municipal governments have considered or begun
to implement plans for large-scale free fibre, wire or wireless
access across central business districts or wider metropolitan
areas.
Brisbane, for example, tested
free wireless access in parts of the central city. In 2004
Philadelphia announced
plans for "some level of free wireless access to everyone
living, working or visiting the city", centred on mounting
up to 16 Wi-Fi routers per square mile on streetlights
Wireless
Philadelphia aims to strengthen the City's economy and
transform Philadelphia's neighborhoods by providing
wireless internet access throughout the city. Wireless
Philadelphia will work to create a digital infrastructure
for open-air internet access and to help citizens, businesses,
schools, and community organizations make effective
use of this technology to achieve their goals while
providing a greater experience for visitors to the City.
The
notion that adding wireless (or, if you are a fan of Richard
Florida, decent espressos and GLBT-friendly policeman
or two) will significantly increase your city's competitive
advantage has been persuasive.
The Wireless Athens Georgia Zone (WAGz)
is promoted as
a
"wireless cloud" that provides WiFi connectivity
in the public spaces in downtown Athens. The WAGz is
a real-world research test-bed where we can build prototype
mobile media systems, experiment with new devices, and
investigate what people want to do with this powerful
new technology. It's an exciting project. And
like Athens itself, the WAGZone is new everyday
In
practice most plans have centred on outdoor access and
on access to a municipal intranet, particularly one that
provides tourism or other service information. That orientation
reflects limitations in delivery (eg the low range of
Wi-Fi relative to WiMAX), recognition that most city residents
currently do not have wireless-equipped desktop or laptop/PDA
equipment, concerns about responsibility and concerns
about competition with commercial service providers.
Some enthusiasts have been inspired by wired community
and municipal freenets of the early 1990s.
Allan Batteau's 1995 The Social Architecture of Community
Computing offered
a caution to hyperbole about 'virtual communities' from
Rheingold and others, commenting that
Use
of a freenet requires one to own a computer or travel
to a library or other institution that makes computers
available to the public. One of the earliest freenets
, the Santa Monica Public Access Network, established
kiosks that allowed even the homeless of Santa Monica
to have email addresses. Before the netbozos took over,
this access had some great benefits for Santa Monica:
It improved communication between the homeless and other
residents of the city, allowed those who had been voiceless
to articulate their needs, and led to the creation of
some innovative city services for the homeless. The
ultimate fate of Santa Monica PAN, where a few angry
voices crowded everyone else off the air, is also illustrative
of the limitations of this technology: It created new
public spaces. But like all public spaces, in the absence
of policing (a system administrator or moderator), Gresham's
law took over. Bad tokens drove out good
Similar
cautions come from Peter van den Besselaar's paper
The life and death of the great Amsterdam Digital
City.
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