[CWN-Summit] Mayor prorosed giving away public resources for ATT "free" wifi, assistance in commentary please

[Ben]

Hello Community Wifi,

I attended last year's conference in St. Louis on behalf of St. Louis
Indymedia (stlimc.org) and their parent organization CAMP (stlcamp.org),
and likewise the Media Reform Conference this year.  Although I'm
stretched quite thin among various endeavors, experiences and awareness
gained at both conferences have definitely given me food for thought for
pursuing media empowerment projects in St. Louis.  And so I ask for
assistance and insight from list members more knowledgeable of these topics.

Just today the Mayor issued a declaration that he is proposing
partnership with ATT to provide wifi citywide:

http://www.mayorslay.com/desk/display.asp?deskID=633 (Mayor's
declaration/"blog," can't post comments)

http://www.archcitychronicle.com/archives/002365.php (local newspaper
blog, with insightful comments from readers)

http://stlcin.missouri.org/Document/aldermen/PDF/BB4161.pdf (relevant
aldermanic board bill)

It's quite hard to not be unsettled by some buzzwords in this
declaration and immediately think "boondoggle."  The Mayor proposes
giving ATT permission to install wifi nodes on city-owned utility poles
to broadcast a low-speed, free service and higher-speed paid service.
My suspicion is that these nodes will be comparable to the
heavily-encrypted 2Wire wifi boxes which Yahoo/SBC/ATT already sends to
DSL customers, with something similar to their existing, tiered broadband.

Immediate thoughts:
1. What are true economic benefits to the city?  The declaration states
that the paid service will be used compensate investors supporting this
project, but what happens once the investors are paid off?  Will ATT be
allowed to continue to profiting off city-own infrastructure, or will
those profits be used to extend this wifi service to more areas of the
city?  Much of this might by explained in the "Agreement" attached to
the bill, but I've not found that agreement (online) yet.  That
agreement will mostly certainly not be attached to the ballot (city
election in March).

2. What are true social benefits to the city?  The "Central West End"
district, where this service is supposed to be rolled out first, is one
of the wealthiest districts in the city, so there's already extensive
broadband penetration there.  This wifi service there seems to amount
only to further enrichment of an enriched enclave.  On the other hand,
the most impoverished neighborhoods, mostly in the north of the city,
have such degraded public infrastructure that even basic electrical
service can be spotty.  A local computer-literacy organization called
WizKids told me they routinely found people's homes in north city to
have wiring so poor they couldn't power a desktop PC.  Blanketing these
areas with wifi (if ever actually deployed there) would frankly do very
little to bridge that digital divide.

3. Why no public input?  This arrangement with ATT appears to have been
made behind closed doors, and the Mayor's 1st public move is to
"request" an aldermanic bill that presumably would give ATT permission
to hang their equipment off public infrastructure.  I wonder if this was
hatched at last minute to keep from falling behind a similar (but more
open) project developing for St. Louis County:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/AB4ECCB73F716FFD86257272000E7875?OpenDocument
http://www.dailywireless.org/2007/01/29/st-louis-county-cloud/

A pernicious element is that the Mayor's proposal ONLY permits ATT to
deploy city-wide wifi, and not solicit bids from Google, Earthlink, as
so on, as the County is considering.  St. Louis city history
unfortunately includes countless examples of public resource giveaways
to private interest, which is what unsettles me so about this latest
proclamation.  I also wonder if the free service is specifically
designed to shut out competition from grassroots-oriented community wifi.

Does this proposal look similar to actions taken by ATT/SBC/etc.
recently in other cities?  The language of the alermanic bill harps on
free city-wide wifi, but neglects not-so-niggling details.


-- 
Ben West
westbywest at riseup.net
http://savetheinternet.org