

BART signs up for 20 years of Wi-Fi - timf
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10154093-94.html

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pavlov
20 years seems like a long commitment to any particular technology.

In 1989, token ring (a LAN technology backed by IBM) was a viable alternative
to Ethernet. If a particularly info-highway-smitten municipality had made a
20-year deal with IBM to have token ring networking installed in all new
buildings, they would have been kicking themselves for the past 15 years...

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TooMuchNick
I have to complain, I've ridden BART in San Francisco for three years and had
no idea I could have signed up for wifi. I wish I'd noticed the network on my
phone and looked into it, but of course looking for wifi on BART never
occurred to me (to save battery life I have "search for networks" turned off).
I ride the train almost every day and I've never seen a notice at a station
about the network. If only 16,000 people of several million in the BART
service area signed up, then apparently tens or hundreds of thousands of wifi-
enabled commuters never heard of this either.

And now they'll be expected to pay as much per month for a daily hour of the
Internet as they do for constant access at work and home.

As a layperson, the only reasons I can see for BART to set such a high price
point are a misunderstanding about the economics or a desire to keep usage at
a low, manageable level.

I suspect I should be glad that there's wifi at all, at any price, but frankly
$30 a month makes this "public service" a toy for highly paid commuters rather
than an intensely useful public tool for all the area's travelers. I hope
against hope that the daily and hourly fees aren't high enough to remind me of
AOL-by-the-hour. To think we've reached a point where the privately owned
cafes give away wireless, and the publicly owned transit charges for it.

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jonursenbach
I'd rather have them charge for the WiFi service in liu of raising, already
above national public transit average, prices to give it away for free.

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TooMuchNick
The difference of magnitude between the revenue of the proposed wifi charges
and the revenue of BART ticket prices is so staggering that a comparison makes
little sense. It's much more likely that money could be taken from another
area of costs than that the cost of wifi would affect ticket prices.

I'm not saying the money will appear out of nowhere, but it's certainly not
staggering if the current charge structure is expected to create a profit for
the company that installed the network.

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CalmQuiet
This raises so many doubts. As with numerous other comments to the original SF
Chronicle article, I am outraged at the idea that _one more WIFI_ service area
thinks I should be subscribing for $30/ month or so. Right :/ Furthermore: who
decided to sign a 10-year contract? The supervising Board for BART must have
been blinded by its drool over a cash cow to help fund its operations. Did it
not occur to them that it's likely rates will be coming down because of
increased competition & new technologies within even _5_ years? Of course
16,000 signed up _for free_. Let's form a pool to bet how long it'll take to
get that number of _paid_ subscribers.

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rockstar9
The day pass for wifi is $10? I think by 2011 (date set to be completed), a
lot of people will be on mobile data plans and it won't really be worth it to
pay for internet on a 30 min ride.

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timr
Good luck getting mobile data signals on BART -- it's difficult just to
maintain a cell phone call. The value here is the _consistency_ of the signal.

(Not that I think that $10 is reasonable for a day pass.)

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jonursenbach
Which line are you riding on? I take BART from Dublin/Pleasanton to New
Montgomery every day and the only time I lose my signal is through the Lake
Merrit tunnel and Transbay Tube.

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timr
I mainly commute between the city and Berkeley. The signal obviously goes dead
in the transbay, but it's been pretty spotty in the above-ground parts, too.

