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Blog: Internet Another WiFi Plan Bites the Dust, for Now
Michael Hoffman (Blog) - October 31, 2007 12:05 AM

5 comment(s) - last by MagnumMan.. on Nov 2 at 12:21 PM

The Sacramento WiFi initiative is temporarily dead

Another ambitious plan to cover a U.S. city with free wireless Internet access has temporarily been killed –- again. Not surprisingly, the leading issue of money was the cause behind the temporary halt to talks surrounding WiFi in Sacramento, California.

Sacramento Metro Connect, the consortium of companies wanting to construct the network, hasn't been able to collect the scratch required to move forward. Sacramento Metro Connect, currently headed by Anne-Marie Fowler, is made up of Azulstar, Cisco Systems, Intel and SeaKay, but still has no idea when, if ever, the proper finances will be secured. According to The Sacramento Bee, Fowler has almost $1 million of the necessary money to begin the $7-to-$9 million effort.

"We have a lot of interested investors, but it's a matter of assembling the right group. We don't want someone coming in for a quick buck. We want someone who will stay with us for a few years,” Fowler said.

Investors appear to be a bit more pessimistic about citywide WiFi in California's capitol, especially since there are more horror stories of other failed WiFi movements.

"There are more crash stories than success stories in the muni Wi-Fi space, so investors are really careful,” said Scott Lenet, a venture capitalist who runs DFJ Frontier in Sacramento.

Much like other failed WiFi plans, a free service would be available with a faster connection available for a subscription fee per month. Sacramento Metro Connect would offer connections up to 1 MB per second for free, but users wanting a faster connection would have had to pay anywhere from $15 to $50 per month.

I recently wrote a blog about WiFi initiatives in San Francisco and Chicago also being killed, mainly due to EarthLink's recent demise. As pointed out in the blog, the city of Sacramento has chosen to become the "anchor point," which is one of the crucial building blocks for a possible service to actually succeed.

I believe it will be interesting to see who Fowler brings on board to help collect additional financial resources in the future.

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Can I get this to

By Bioniccrackmonk on 10/31/2007 12:41:18 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Sacramento Metro Connect would offer connections up to 1 MB per second for free

I pay Comcast $40 a month for broadband access and I don't get anywhere near the speed of 1 MB a second.

RE: Can I get this to

By TheDiceman on 10/31/2007 1:57:22 PM , Rating: 2

Few people in the US actaully get the speeds they pay for. I pay about $40 for what is supposed to be 3mb down / 1mb up. At best I get 800k down/up. Part of that is to do with the ancient wiring in my building though. Personally I still wonder why the states has such low speeds from ISP's relative to what you get in many other countries (primarily Aisa and to a lesser extent Europe).

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RE: Can I get this to

By clovell on 10/31/2007 5:29:10 PM , Rating: 2

Because the infrastructure is older - being that it was built sooner - and also because there's a lot more ground to cover in the US than in European countries.

I pay $40 a month and I can consistently hit 5-6 mbps on Comcast, and I've even seen it burst to 20 mbps when I'm running speed tests.

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RE: Can I get this to

By MagnumMan on 11/2/2007 12:21:13 PM , Rating: 2

Actually you are probably paying for 3Mb/s = 300KB/s with "PowerBoost" which can get you up to 800KB/s, assuming they combine your upload and download throughput during the "boost"... 4Mb/s * 2 (PowerBoost) = 800KB/s.

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RE: Can I get this to

By MagnumMan on 11/2/2007 12:12:23 PM , Rating: 2

I suspect what they meant was 1Mbps which comes out to about 100KB/s throughput. That would be reasonable free access. My Comcast connection gets about 6Mbps on transfers, once it jumped up to 15Mbps and surprised me.

10Mb/s = 1 MB/s (roughly) throughput; the capitalization of the b vs B is important. The former is bits, the latter bytes. And even though there are 8 bits to a byte, when you look at throughput on real implementations you'll find with protocol overhead and everything else that you lose enough so that you can round it out to 10:1.

The bigger question is really how secure is a city-wide WiFi going to be? You'll be on a shared network with everyone else. Sure it'll be partitioned by area, but you darn well better have some decent firewall on your computers!

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"Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be." -- Steve Ballmer