I’m glad I’m not the only one skeptical about the mayor’s wi-fi dreams. It strikes me as a bourgeois wishlist item dressed in populist garb. Besides, do we even know if wi-fi is going to be a standard five or ten, much less twenty years from now? Computer technology changes rapidly.
Adam Gaffin brings up the obvious point (the city’s not too stellar budget), and also something I’d not considered:
You probably wouldn’t want to give up your own broadband service because the only way the city will get to do this is if they don’t offend the ISP Gods, i.e. Verizon and Comcast, which they will do by a) ensuring the bandwidth is slower than offerings from them and b) by periodically kicking users off the network to make them log in again, which would be a serious annoyance to serious ‘Net users.
Mind you, I’m still not sure this whole proposition is a serious one, that it’s not a threat by the city to sap telecom business (seemingly doing quite well under the local monopolies established by several "deregulation" acts favorable to the industry) in order to get them to lower prices. If that’s the case it may work (is working) but may backfire if the telecoms call the City’s bluff.
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