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Muni Wi-Fi: teething pains or terminal symptoms?
By Larry Hendrick | June 25, 2006
I guess the thing that frustrates me the most, is that, none of this is news. Everyone in the industry knows this (about leaves, walls, and stucco), yet the proponents of Muni WiFi continue to ignore the facts about this particular technology and push to collect money for services rendered. Even if the services don’t work.
In the past, we called these kind of people, Crooks or Con Artists, yet today, they are applauded and given contracts and buckets of money, then when the system doesn’t work, they get more money to install more equipment, and it still doesn’t work, so they get more money … well, you get the picture. Or maybe you don’t … you’re the one that keeps pushing on this whole Muni WiFi project. What you need is a “Dose of Reality” pill.
Muni Wi-Fi: teething pains or terminal symptoms?:
“In Chaska, “there was a lot of pre-conceived notions that you could just blast [Wi-Fi signals] through walls and trees and everything,” Mayer said. “Instead, Mayer made some unpleasant discoveries. Like the fact that wet leafy trees absorb radio signals, hampering Wi-Fi coverage. And this one: Wi-Fi signals don’t pass through stucco like they did wooden walls, another negative for coverage.”
Poor customer service, uneven coverage, and at one stage declining performance caused hundreds of early subscribers to become the first unsubscribers. The city shelled out an additional $300,000, over and above the original $600,000 investment, for more access points, gateways, and radio reconfiguration. According to the Tribune story, the city shelled out still more money this past spring for the latest generation of Tropos nodes, and additional money to outsource net maintenance and support to Siemens.
One thing I would have liked to know from this article is the cost of latest nodes and the outsourcing fees. The story left it at at total of $900,000, then added those items without pricing. Let’s just say that the city spent a million more than they thought, and this is not a large city, by any means.
Topics: WiFi |