>The library has set aside 50 hotspots just for Seattle’s homeless camps, funded in part by $305,000 from Google
This must be a mistake, somehow. That comes out to $6,100 per hot spot, which was still apparently not enough, alone, to fund them.
This must be a mistake, somehow. That comes out to $6,100 per hot spot, which was still apparently not enough, alone, to fund them.
On top of that, you've got ongoing maintenance, abuse, etc... dealing with that bullshit costs money, and even more if you allow anonymous connections.
As for the cost... For the record, I've lived over a year around the poverty line... In Australia--An even more expensive country. I also did a loop around the country, saw and went everywhere I wanted to go, spent most of my time at the beach or mountains, and surfing... and oh yea, had internet the entire time. Even amortizing that cost over ten years, this is still double what I spent on wifi.
Literally everything about public wifi, from the wiring and build costs, to the hardware and antennas, to the bandwidth itself is significantly more expensive. $6,100 per point sounds completely reasonable.
The article states they are providing up to 834 people with internet access with 50+11 hot spots.
I shared a 20$ data plan with two+ travelmates while on gap year in Australia, and it worked extremely well. $7/person cost. Give or take for US data rates and inflation since then.
Even with generous assumptions, these wifi hot spots are at least 50x, and coule be 100x, that cost.
So worst case scenario, just buy them all smart phones and data plans for a small fraction of the cost of this current setup.
A hotspot provides access for an untold number of people, potentially hundreds. Of course it's more expensive than your individual bill.
I could provide wifi access to 10 people with only my cheap data bill + phone. It wouldn't be an ideal situation, but it would still be a better user experience than the dial-up internet I grew up with.
You're still underestimating the man hours, equipment costs, and recurring nature of this endeavor. And this service is providing a needed connection to important information, contact with loved ones, and a safe source of entertainment. It is not comparable to the luxury service you grew up with.
So, you mean violate the AUP on your phone and push the costs for the people selling you the data plan upwards? sure, maybe that'd kinda work until the upstream noticed.
If you mean that it would have been cheaper to just give each homeless person their own phone +data plan... that might actually be a better idea, if you can find a cheap enough data plan/phones and you aren't supporting that many homeless people.
To go back to the restaurant example, you have to hand out a lot of soup before running a soup kitchen becomes cheaper than just handing out McDonald's "free item from the dollar menu" coupons.
That's a reasonable thing to consider, assuming that the quality is good enough.
I was just saying that if you want a wifi access point that supplies a bunch of users, well, someone is gonna have to hook that up to the internet, and deal with the inevitable abuse problems that come from providing internet access to people you don't know. And yes, a lot of people do this for free, which is probably why it seems so cheap for you. Which is fine; I mean, I'm all for people giving out free services, I use a lot of free software myself, but don't pretend that those people aren't giving you value, or that it wouldn't cost a lot of money if you didn't want exactly what they were giving.
Even if you've got free labor, you've gotta run power and internet access out to that wifi access point. Real internet connections are expensive; even consumer-grade stuff is expensive if the provider isn't already where you are, and consumer-grade connections shouldn't be shared.
Have you ever tried to talk a network provider into running a line across the street, when they don't already have customers in that area? Here in silicon valley we're talking in the high thousands/low tens of thousands of dollars to get a connection across a street.
I mean, it's great that you were able to find wifi for yourself on your vacation, but that doesn't have anything to do with how much effort and money it costs to maintain those wifi access points.
If I am able to provide a wifi hotspot for a year at some cost, that has some relevance to providing a wifi hotspot at some other cost.
You weren't providing a hotspot to others in any systematic sort of way. You were consuming internet services provided for free or near free by other people.
I'd compare it to the difference between spending for a year feeding yourself through asking for alms or through the McDonalds dollar menu, and running a restaurant. Both involve food, but the former does not predict the difficulty level of the latter.
It wouldn't occur to me to just give people low end data plans, because for office environments? even the very high end data plans are not acceptable compared to a quality wifi setup. You might very well be right that the low end data plans are good enough for this use case, that the hit you take in reliability and accessibility is worth it to save some money.
This is actually... a problem that I (and I think a lot of technical people have) when looking at solutions; we want a good solution, and our every instinct shouts in horror when you suggest something trashy that is going to be broken half the time. But... as you point out, there are a lot of people who's expectations are so low that the low-end cellular data plan seems just fine.
It certainly seems to me like if you could get a good municipal wifi setup, that'd be worth a lot to the community. Of course, most of the 'community wifi' attempts I've seen have been failures, because making wifi work at scale with random users is a lot harder than it looks, but I think the win is big enough that it's worth trying again every few years, as we gain better wifi technologies.
But really? I'm a sysadmin, not a social worker. I can tell you a lot about setting up wifi access points, and about getting network access where there isn't any network access. I can't tell you what issues you are gonna have trying to give homeless people internet access, or what issues you might have trying to give them special phones (all the really cheap cellular providers around here don't allow you to bring your own device) or how reliable network access has to be in order for it to be useful to the homeless population- I just was offended by the implication that setting up a multi user WIFI AP for random users in places that don't have wired connections is cheap or easy.
Anyways there are poverty rate statistics for single people, and families.
And for the record, I was hardly roughing it. I met an awesome French girl who claimed to have spent 6 months in Oz on under 1k EUR (doing mostly woof'ing).
>But money proposed for Wi-Fi was spent on more pressing needs... >In 2016, Seattle Public Library stepped in. ... funded in part by $305,000 from Google.
So the govt proposal for WiFi was underfunded, then the Public Library stepped in with different funds partially from Google.