(2007-01-30) Frankston Muni Wifi Model

Bob Frankston on re-FramIng Municipal Wifi as OpenNet. We must be careful to avoid the notion of the city being the exclusive provider and instead, in the spirit of the Internet it can and must come from the edge with each of us contributing to create the whole... I'm enthusiastic about wireless connectivity but believe we can do far better by taking control from the edges of the network rather than modeling as a service in the style of Broad Band and the earlier digital phone networks. We already have abundant connectivity - at least potentially. But we have it locked down into exclusive "broadband pipes". Rather than building another service delivery system we should take control of what we already have. It's shameful we have no ownership to our basic Infrastructure. It's owned by carriers so who use it to sell us services... Rather than framing municipal connectivity as just another exclusive service delivery platform we have to make existing capacity available and add to it. I was once an enthusiastic supporter of municipal connectivity but now I fear it. The basic dynamic of the Internet is one of taking advantage of opportunities and discovering what's possible and this can lead to conflicts with the model of the city as a service provider. The cities have an important role as a contributor rather than exclusive provider... Today's access points are problematic because they can expose internal network traffic. But we can address that problem by improved NAT software which partitions segregates internal traffic and perhaps gives it a preference. VPN technology allows mobile users to maintain safe and stable connections to the rest of the Internet without depending upon meshes or other centralized implementations... Note that I said "plan to" - the actual implementations of these projects tend to be difficult because cities tend to be process heavy - to say it nicely. This alone would be reason enough to be skeptical even if there were no other issues... We then need to ask why - what is the purpose of MWF? It's certainly not for people Walking around browsing on their Lap Top-s looking at web pages... Why spend a lot of money to build an entirely new infrastructure when we already have existing "broadband" infrastructure that we've paid for? It makes a lot more sense (and dollars) to simply share an access point (HotSpot) among nearby houses and even not so near if we have a relay... Unless we provide abundant connectivity we can easily find ourselves trying to prevent "abuse" (and, worse, defining abuse) in order to keep explicit or implicit promises... Perhaps the most important step the city can take is to drop the word "WireLess" (as in the DD (Digital Divide) example above). It doesn't really matter how we provide connectivity. Wireless is just part of the mix. Public Housing should be connected as a matter of course. In fact future Housing Code-s (Zoning) should presume connectivity... We have trouble imagining how much capacity there really is and the importance of sharing a single infrastructure. If you've got firefighters (Fire Department) working in a basement they must be able to take advantage of any available connectivity. Better improve all streets than create a parallel network of streets for each purpose... We should assume that we have abundant common infrastructure funded as a commons rather than as billable services and then work to transition to this model.