[CWN-Summit] Re: CWN-Summit Digest, Vol 30, Issue 1

[dan at kdhx.org]

I've been working on community wifi in the city for KDHX for months now. 
The city essentially refused to participate in the consortiums that are
working on area-wide wifi.  Additionally, the mayor's office and the
mayor's IT personnell have not returned calls in the past weeks asking
about their plans for citywide wifi.  This plan was most certainly hatched
behind closed doors and is likely related to the city's support of
Missouri Sentate bill 284.  Boondoggle indeed.

Dan Adelman
KDHX FM 88.1 | KDHX TV 21+22

> 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
>
>
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> End of CWN-Summit Digest, Vol 30, Issue 1
> *****************************************
>