Yesterday, a Special Meeting was held by the city of San Francisco to revisit the plans for their city-wide Wi-Fi project. Testimony was heard from Esme Vos of Muniwireless, Greg Richardson of Civitium, Emy Tseng from TechConnect's Digital Inclusion Program, and "members of the public": Ralph Muehlen and Tim Pozar of SFLan; Bruce Wolfe; Andre Chan, UC Berkeley; Doug Loranger, SNAFU; David Fierberg, SEAKAY; James Chaffee; Carlos Rios, NextWLAN; Kimo Crossman; Bill Colquitt; Peter Warfield; Chris Ruth; Ron Vincent, DTIS.
A few key points that were brought up about the current plan for a Wi-Fi network:
-Frequency issues and interference problems inherent with Wi-Fi on the unlicensed 2.4GHz band
-Net neutrality and future device support
-How to handle changing standards and obsolescence?
-Can it reach 90% indoor coverage?
-300kbps speed is too slow
-Fiber-to-the-home options
-Needs analysis or business case study should be performed
-Accounting for city use, public safety, etc.
-Should the network be city-owned or city-controlled? If so, should the city own it and outsource operations?
-Testing with a pilot program before a major rollout
And here's a very interesting point related to privacy... Would the Google/Earthlink targetted advertising proposal be similar to, say, Amazon.com outsourcing city library functions for free in exchange for checkout records? (We noticed that people who checked out books by Ann Coulter ultimately bought books by Anne Rice.)
The meeting runs for about 2 hours, is packed with information, and is well worth watching.
Watch the full hearing on SFGTV video archive. (Via the SOCALWUG mailing list)
