
New York is installing its promised public gigabit Wi-Fi - daegloe
http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/28/10674634/linknyc-new-york-public-wifi-installation-photos-gigabit
======
mwsherman
Wifi is still not a good WAN (municipal) technology. It has never succeeded.
Many NYC public parks offer free wifi and I don’t know anyone that uses it.

4G/LTE/etc is engineered for uncontrolled, outdoor spaces. It works more
reliably than Wifi in that environment.

Wifi’s UX is poor in that environment – you’re already connected to 4G but
connecting to Wifi requires effort. And one assumes that if one is on the
street, one will be walking out of range of that Wifi within a few minutes. I
don’t understand the use case.

(The sitting-in-Starbucks use case makes more sense.)

Politicians like the sound of Wifi. Users walking down the street, by and
large, ignore it.

~~~
nothrabannosir
Minor win: it's fantastic for tourists. Roaming kills, and it's great to have
access to free wifi (maps, booking sites, e-mail, messaging, whatsapp calls,
&c) in a foreign country.

~~~
santaclaus
Agreed -- Vienna has free wifi (at least in the CBD) and this was awesome when
visiting the city.

~~~
lmcnish14
Same for Wellington's waterfront wifi! It was very helpful for quick Skype
calls and looking up information, especially when internet anywhere else in
the city was very expensive.

------
greggman
I'm trying to state this is a way that would just get massively downvoted.

It doesn't feel to me like internet access works the same as other utilities.
The need for water per individual hasn't changed much in 80 years? 100years?
more? The need for electricity has gone up a little since say 1940. Natural
gas, and other utilities. Maybe even streets also seem relatively static?

But internet? So NYC installs gigi wifi today. In 10 years Korea and Japan and
Singapore and China will have tera-wifi or peta-wifi and NYC would likely have
nothing. Getting public tech services upgraded at or near the speed that tech
accelerates seems highly unlikely. Having public wifi would seem like it would
remove a huge incentive for anyone to come in and offer better faster service
because competing with free will be hard for a very very long time.

Am I wrong?

Also, please don't devolve this into ISPs suck in America. I fully agree with
that statement. I'm just not sure public wifi is the answer.

For example in Japan it was competition that got internet faster in general.
Specifically Yahoo/Softbank Japan kept undercutting the competition with
faster and cheaper internet and all the other ISPs were forced to respond.
That doesn't seem to happen in the USA because of poor regulations (local
government approved monopolies)

I'm just curious if public wifi is really the correct solution or if it's
actually going to end up much worse in the long run.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> The need for water per individual hasn't changed much in 80 years? 100years?
> more?

Unlikely. 100 years ago we didn't have nearly as much water infrastructure and
appliances. It's difficult to find data on past years though but when looking
at other countries that have less amenities than the United States the water
usage is staggeringly different [1].

I would be shocked if, per person, the water usage hasn't gone up by double
since 1915. Don't forget the infrastructure also has to handle a far denser
population as well.

> The need for electricity has gone up a little since say 1940.

Define little. Almost everything we do today involves electricity whereas in
the 1940s that was far from true plus the population has grown significantly
since then. WorldBank seems to indicate it's been increasing (they have data
since 1989) [2].

> Natural gas, and other utilities. Maybe even streets also seem relatively
> static?

Are you sure? Where are you getting this data? According to the EIA[3] natural
gas usage has gone up about 5x since 1949.

> Getting public tech services upgraded at or near the speed that tech
> accelerates seems highly unlikely. Having public wifi would seem like it
> would remove a huge incentive for anyone to come in and offer better faster
> service because competing with free will be hard for a very very long time.

While I agree with you there is also a huge burden on getting around publicly
allowed monopolies for the last mile (since the wifi needs some sort of data
connection) so I'm not convinced any private companies are going to do this
anyway due to that unless the government is going to offer some serious
incentives or someone invents a better wireless technology which doesn't
require a physical internet connection to the access point.

[1]
[http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=757](http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=757)

[2]
[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC)

[3]
[https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_cons_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm](https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_cons_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm)

~~~
yonran
I believe your parent post was referring to household usage (which determines
infrastructure needs in a city), while you are referring to economy-wide
usage.

Energy usage per household seems to be essentially flat for the past 40 years
according to Residential Energy Consumption Survey[1].

As for water, I can’t find any links at the moment, but I would guess that per
capita indoor residential water use is also flat or slowly declining as
appliances become more efficient.

[1]
[http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=6570](http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=6570)

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Per household is kinda irrelevant for his point, is it not? You need the
additional infrastructure to handle a more dense population and his point was
regarding the upgrading of utilities.

------
PudgePacket
Free wifi is very popular, though it makes me wonder why free wifi providers
don't provide data the same way cellular networks do though 4G/LTE/etc, albeit
in a limited area?

I don't know about the technical limitations but it seems a solution that
would cover a much larger area, and most peoples phones already have mobile
data enabled.

Are phones simply not set up to handle multiple mobile data networks ?

~~~
mgraczyk
Without significant changes to most phones, you would need to issue SIM cards
to all participants. It's not impossible to change, but the provider would
need to convince 3GPP and OEM vendors to do so.

------
rgawdzik
How would a city handle the pressure from telco's if they offer free, reliable
wifi? Wouldn't all residential's switch to the free wifi, making telcos lose
hundreds of thousands of customers?

Has there been a case where free wifi for a city has been implemented reliably
where residential stopped purchasing internet from a telco?

~~~
Zigurd
Free public wifi, unless intensively engineered in cases where problems
develop, can't promise 100% coverage to everyone's residence. Some people will
get a windfall that effectively replaces their SP's service. Some will get
only unusable connectivity.

SPs have a simple way to compete: Offer service that provides a lot more
bandwidth than the free service. They should do that anyway, now that Google
Fiber has announced a push into some major cities.

~~~
RankingMember
Would people in the "good coverage" area be able to run repeaters for this
kind of WiFi provider so that, for example, their friend across the street
could be covered? I'm not familiar enough with large-scale WiFi infrastructure
to know whether they have mechanisms in place to prevent such practices (or if
they'd want to).

------
brooklyndude
Companies absorbed, dead links, contracts that had to be met at midnight, one
booth with wifi, zero chance of getting anything like this out into NYC
wasteland (where millions live). Soon the flashing giant ad monitors will all
be strewn across midtown, not a byte will make it to deep Brooklyn not a one.

Do some googling on this one, follow the trail of disappearing companies
involved, in the end, Google took it all over, that's the footnote, its all
Google running the show now. But hey, more screens, that's Times Square. I'm
ok with that. :-)

------
onion2k
I hope the data they gather on people connecting to each gateway as they move
around the city is anonymised (as much as it can be) and then made open and
freely accessible. That'd be fascinating.

------
ape4
> The city estimates that ads served by the new hubs will generate more than
> $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years.

Seems a bit optimistic to me. Are they going to inject ads in your http
connection.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
The physical "wifi booths" they are installing have 2 - 55" flat screen TVs
that will run ads on them.

Back of the napkin math time: that's $41mil a year generated over 8000ish
("over 7500" is what the official announcement said) booths, which is $5125 or
just shy of $500/mo in revenue per booth to hit that target.

I'm not in the physical display advertising business, but that would generally
seem pretty doable given some quick research into NYC ad costs.

------
qwerty_asdf
Uh, so... how will we know it's not being spoofed?

And uh... how many people will know enough to be mindful on the total lack of
encryption?

You know, just like at Starbucks and the like?

~~~
argh_tfm
[http://www.link.nyc/faq.html](http://www.link.nyc/faq.html)

~~~
qwerty_asdf

      Question:
    
      How secure is LinkNYC Wi-Fi?
    
      Answer:
    
      The LinkNYC Private network is one of the first 
      free municipal Wi-Fi services in the country to 
      offer an encrypted network connection between your 
      device and the hotspot, securing all wireless 
      communications between devices and the Link.
    

Gee, sounds swell! But how?

~~~
revelation
Probably, not at all.

I just visited the site, and it has this extraordinary claim:

 _In addition to Link’s features being free to the public, they also come at
no cost to taxpayers._

So either they have a money printing machine, or they will be doing DPI and
adding in / replacing advertisements in no time.

~~~
enraged_camel
Did you read the article?

"The full network will install more than 7,500 public hubs throughout the
city, each replacing a pre-existing phone booth. Once completed, the hubs will
also include USB device charging ports, touchscreen web browsing, and two
55-inch advertising displays. The city estimates that ads served by the new
hubs will generate more than $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years."

------
rayiner
This makes a lot more sense than municipal wired.

~~~
slashink
Genuinly interested in understanding your viewpoint. If you have some time,
please elaborate. I have always been under the impression that municipal fiber
to consumers has the best benefits in the long run but I might have missed
something.

~~~
rayiner
Municipal Fiber is a solution looking for a problem. The overwhelming trend is
toward mobile. Many people, particularly lower income people, have a smart
phone but no computer. At the same time, municipal Fiber is incredibly
expensive. Chatanooga spent $330 million plus on their network, to wire up
about 71,000 subscribers. Plus, maintenance of that infrastructure is very
expensive. Given that most states and municipalities are broke, and have
neglected crucial electric and water infrastructure that already exists, they
can't afford to take on the cost of a Fiber network.

~~~
superuser2
The wireless technologies we have today don't deliver anywhere close to the
throughput of fiber. There's no way municipal WiFi will support every
household running a couple of Netflix streams at the same time in the evening,
something that's (occasionally) possible on cable infrastructure. We've
already seen from dense apartment buildings that WiFi does not deal well with
more than a handful of active users at close range, even on separate SSIDs.

Some form of radio communication might be the answer, but there is very little
unallocated bandwidth and it's bandwidth that we need.

~~~
rayiner
If we're going to spend limited public resources on building network
infrastructure, the target use case shouldn't be households watching a couple
of Netflix streams in the evening on their iPads. We should instead build the
technologies that can deliver the broadest connectivity at the lowest cost, so
people can apply for jobs, kids can do homework, send pictures to their
friends or parents, etc. Wireless wins big on flexibility, and can be deployed
at a cost that might allow cash-strapped municipalities to offer it as a free
service. You'll never achieve that with high-cost and high-maintenance wired
infrastructure.

~~~
superuser2
Every New Yorker can already get good enough internet to apply for jobs and do
homework, both from an ISP and a local public library. That need is already
well served by current infrastructure; there's no point in duplicating it. If
current options are too expensive, than subsidies would seem much simpler than
new infrastructure.

Municipal fiber is not proposed in places that lack internet service, it's
proposed in places that lack _good_ internet service. People are upset that
aging and oversubscribed cable company infrastructure isn't good enough for
their media consumption desires, and municipal fiber is the solution.

Where we have problems getting people online _at all_ is in rural areas, where
1) there are no municipalities and 2) distances are far too long for WiFi.
There, the best option is low-cost point-to-point antennae on high ground. The
hard part for rural Wireless ISPs has been finding someone to sell them
transit at a fair price.

~~~
Zigurd
I've got better internet in rural New Mexico, due to a subsidy to a local ISP
to put in fiber, than I do in a town in Massachusetts that is full of people
in the tech industry.

------
mizzao
The link seems to be broken at the moment.

