New York is installing its promised public gigabit Wi-Fi
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
The use case is by now more than fleshed out.
Users connect to it once, and done. It’s cheap, fast, and simple.
You don’t have to worry about falling back to roaming when you walk out of the range of the network, as your phone automatically stops downloading that huge file as soon as WiFi stops.
But most phones have no way to mark a specific 4G network as "good roaming", cheaper than normal.
Actually, this doesn't quite seem to be the case. When I went to Denmark a couple of months ago my phone didn't consider it roaming, since I have a contract where I have the same prices there and at home.
But there’s no way to mark a network as better than normal.
For example, if you connect to WiFi, Android will recognize it as a non-mobile network, and start doing updates, etc. If you start listening to a song via Play Music on WiFi, and then go out of range, it will automatically downgrade the quality, or stop playing and ask you if you want to continue.
If you are on "NYC 4G", and go back to your own 4G network, there’s no way for Android to stop streaming that FLAC song, because it doesn’t know a way to tell that one 4G network is equivalent to WiFi, but another is not.
Since the wi-fi radio is different from the cellular data radio in the phone, it's trivial to set different policies depending on which radio the phone is using. The settings to allow differentiation exist because we know implicitly that a wi-fi connection won't be draining your expensive data plan. The phone doesn't actually look at a connection's bandwidth/signal quality/etc to do this.
But you can’t tell it that a 4G network is unmetered.
You also seem to overestimate how many people can afford a data plan like we (probably) have. Or just young people. Or people who don't use the Internet that often at all. It is probably not ment for the average HN-reader.
They're not. They keys (and many other things) are stored in "carrier settings" that your provider pushes to your smartphone. In the past we had to set things up like APN & etc manually for the internet to work but not anymore with the settings being pushed automatically (if the provider supports it).
On iOS you can view the current version of pushed settings by seeing the Settings > General > About -> Carrier option.
"Carrier settings updates are small files that can include updates from Apple and your carrier to carrier-related settings, such as network, calling, cellular data, messaging, personal hotspot, and voicemail settings". [1]
mwsherman's original question was "Why would municipalities offer free wifi rather than free 4G?". jws thought it might be important for folks who didn't have data plans. But my point is that if someone has wifi, they also very likely have a smartphone that's capabale of receiving a 4G signal, even if they cannot afford a data plan from their cell network provider.
That's a bit of an assumption. I'd like to see some numbers to support it. I know a bunch of people who have wifi capable devices but not devices capable of 4g. Or they have older smartphones that are not 4g capable.
This isn't quite how I read the comment, but here are some pretty good answers, I think:
1. They would have to either purchase suitable licensed spectrum (literally hundreds of millions of dollars in NYC) or find an existing carrier with which to form an MVNO relationship with generous enough terms that the city could afford to "resell" the service for free.
2. 4G would probably require NYC to deal with distributing phones or SIM cards, and then users would have to figure out how to unlock their devices.
Or in Germany
Yes, there may be technical issues surrounding swapping SIM cards that makes a municipal 4G network unworkable, but this isn't the issue I'm addressing. It's discussed by one of the other commenters. And in fact, this downside would effect the poor the least since they could just pick-up a free municipal SIM card and us it continuously (since they often can't afford a network dataplan), while those who can afford network data plans would constantly need to swap SIM cards.
I have a few obsolete iPads with cellular modems paid up which I "loan" to people who need them. Modern tablets on wifi or even obsolete cellphones on wifi would be better.
(By "loan", I mean I pay the person to take care of some task for me and provide the device so they can do that, but it keeps them and their children online while they sort out their financial situation. Being a teenager without social internet in the US sucks badly at this point. You become "that kid".)
With regards to 4G, any spectrum which can be used for 4G has been bought for billions by the telecom oligopoly. If they wished the poor to have access to social connectivity, they would have done it. At least in the US we politically can't spin up a "basic level" telecom system as a government service. It isn't in our national narrative. So, engineering be damned, it's WiFi or nothing. And lets hope we can keep the telecom oligopoly from jamming Wifi. (Looking at you Verizon and T-Mobile with your LTE-U plans.)
If we could just take the MAC layer from 4G/LTE, I'd be with you, but we can't.
Wifi doesn't replace LTE, complements it. No doubt that the UX is still crappy, but SIM-based authentication can solve that.
Also, unlike LTE, wifi spectrum isn't licensed, anyone can set up a hotspot without paying billions to the government. Sure, we could all solve that by switching the entire world to an unlicensed, pay-as-you-use system, but that's unlikely to happen any time soon.
In other words, spectrum is the major constraint in urban areas.
Wasn't WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) designed for city-wide use?
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.
For all the "American ISPs are terrible" rhetoric, they are profit driven and possibly evil but not incompetent. I feel like if NYC actually had a technology here that could put a home ISP out of business, the current ISPs would have bought it up first. NYC's wifi will be great for residents and tourists trying to check their email or do a quick Google search from their phone, but sustained gigabit connections for every client is way too good to be true.
The capital allocation strategy for current ISPs has been to secure legislation prohibiting competition and sue threats out of existence. They might have invested in R&D as a hedge against that strategy not working, but that would seem to defeat the purpose.
I assumed the hot spots had a gigabit total, not to any one connection. Also, I thought such high wifi rates were only in the lab.
This will actually address your point about private competition. City might offer free 10mbps wifi - whereas private companies will offer paid 50 - 5000mbps.
The free market has had its chance; we've gotten nothing but the token effort from Google Fibre in a tiny handful of markets.
I'm not sure public WiFi is the answer. I'd much rather see municipal fibre from homes to PoPs where consumers can ask to be patched to various ISPs. But competition just isn't doing it.
The largely-unregulated market was given a chance. It created local monopolies and duopolies.
It's long past time to try something else.
Local monopolies were granted by municipalities, certain officials and not the prospective end users. The very first winning bid from a cable company carried the monopoly clause. Once the monopolies had been granted, the market was no longer free; basically the market was (and is) no more.
I'd argue that a free market for cable / broadband access never ever existed.
I agree. This is because that market was never regulated. A free market for POTS/DSL access did exist (and to a large extent still exists). Federally regulated mandatory line sharing made it happen.
It does not benefit the public good to run multiple, competing sets of infrastructure to carry commodities.
However, -as we see in things as disparate as Instant Messaging networks, remote-controlled lightbulbs, and wired Internet access- private business places far more value on capturing and walling in sections of the population than they do helping to facilitate a vibrant, competitive marketplace that promotes customer choice. From a business perspective, this lock-in makes sense. This isn't the best thing for society, though.
It's possible that Cable could eventually have grown to compete technologically, but in a world where Bell was still a single unregulated entity, it strikes me as unlikely that cable could have survived independently.
To build a parallel tax-funded infrastructure like the fine article says, would be just silly in those monopoly markets (instead of enabling commercial competition first; not sure if New York in particular has any meaningful competition, so this may not apply there).
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
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.
What I think is needed, instead of passing lots of regulation and competition hurdle, Government should mandate All new housing to have shielded ( CAT8 ? ) Ethernet cables prewired. Much like electricity and water pipes. You dont buy a new flat and expect to rewire all electricity and water system. You pretty much expect them to be there. It is the same thing with telephone wiring.
Then all new home / building will have a central point of connection, ISP will only be required to connect to that point, and doing some config to enable internet.
Unfortunately its not uncommon in the UK for developers to forget about providing ducting for telco/cable and also working with Virgin/BT to put in the cabs and last mile.
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 ?
It's radically easier to just offer Wi-Fi. There are also new Wi-Fi advances designed to reduce the friction of finding and connecting to a Wi-Fi network. A modern Wi-Fi network is also capable of dramatically greater speeds.
Has there been a case where free wifi for a city has been implemented reliably where residential stopped purchasing internet from a telco?
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.
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. :-)
Seems a bit optimistic to me. Are they going to inject ads in your http connection.
They'll probably move on to DNS spoofing advertiser CDNs.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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."
No the cable monopolies are a real problem.
> The overwhelming trend is toward mobile.
Yes but wired internet is never going away (largely due to physics).
Some form of radio communication might be the answer, but there is very little unallocated bandwidth and it's bandwidth that we need.
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.
LUSFiber is, lacking a better term, solvent.
Which cash strapped municipalities using public funds are you referring to?