San Francisco’s budget analyst estimates that a ubiquitous San
Francisco Wi-Fi network could be built and operated for one year for
$6-$10 million. Ongoing maintenance and operations might cost $2
million a year, and equipment/technology replacement might add another
$1.5 million annually. That’s less than $30 per household one time
($10,000,000/360,000 households) and less than $10 per year per
household for ongoing operations, maintenance and technology upgrades –
for an outdoor solution that could equally serve all citizens and
guests all year much better than dial-up services! That’s an incredibly
cheap and efficient use of public Wi-Fi spectrum, and it overestimates
the costs and does not count the benefits of a truly public network.
A serious flaw in many cities' decision-making process is they
assume a subscription model is the only valuable and viable one.
However, it's not necessarily always true the best way to finance a
network is to have individual subscribers buy service, preferably with
somebody getting a shot at getting rich on the deal as a traditional
service provider. (Even the Budget Analyst’s report above assumes a
subscription services model, thereby overestimating the costs for a
truly public network.)
A subscription service model adds significant costs to an overall
solution from the perspective of society. It requires the creating and
managing systems and organizations to handle customer relationships. It
costs a lot of money to install and maintain billing and collections,
track and enforce service level agreements (SLAs), market and sell
services, manage and provide benefits for all the additional personnel
required for these functions.
Multiple levels of service and paid subscription services degrade
network performance. Technical solutions have to be layered onto the
network to segment traffic, rate limit users according to their paid
tier of service, monitor SLA performance. A wholesale model requires
staff to negotiate and manage wholesale customer relationships,
interconnections with wholesale customer service provider networks,
systems integration between the network provider and its wholesale
customers, wholesale billing, collections, accounting, audit, SLA
enforcement.
All of those additional elements add unnecessary complexity and
cost to the overall network and much of the additional money taken from
subscribers for those purposes goes elsewhere, to corporate operations,
staff and investors elsewhere, rather than staying in a municipality
for the benefit of the local economy. From the perspective of society,
profit is also an unnecessary expense with a subscription-services
solution, and that money also typically leaves and does not benefit the
local economy.
Finally, subscription service models risk business failure and
closure, by not achieving required levels of paid subscriptions to
satisfy investors and managers, and they create conflicts between
public service and profit maximization goals.
Free is free! Let’s just put Wi-Fi networks out there as an
amenity, a public service to citizens and guests on a best efforts
basis, without rate limiting anybody. Let users share bandwidth on the
network at any given time. If there are few users of the network in a
given location, a user will get better performance than with a
rate-limited subscription service. If there are lots of users in a
given location, performance is shared between those users. With no
performance guarantees and appropriate communications and setting of
expectations, that’s OK. It makes the network simpler and less
expensive.
There are individual citizens in most communities who could just
write checks for a muni Wi-Fi network and its operations. Corporate
citizens or government certainly could. Give citizens or
philanthropists an opportunity to say whether they are willing to pay
for the solution, via general funds, property assessments, bond
financing, gifts or grants. A truly ubiquitous and equitable solution
would cost less than 1% of a typical municipal budget. Offer the
service free as an amenity to all citizens and guests as a digital
inclusion strategy. The stimulus to the economy should more than make
up for the costs. A city would be a more appealing tourist, convention
and business location, attracting new hotel, convention and service
revenue. Telecommuting and mobile work would be enabled, reducing
traffic and traffic related expenses and inefficiencies, benefiting the
economy.
An appropriate model for such a free network is the public library, or
public TV or radio. Libraries give citizens the ability to access
books, magazines and information, even if they cannot afford to
purchase them individually. They allow users to share costs, rather
than inefficiently each having to purchase everything and then leaving
those assets dormant or discarded after they’ve been used, rather than
reusing them. Libraries don’t put bookstores out of business any more
than a free Wi-Fi network would put commercial network service
providers out of business. The message to industry is “We welcome you
to come provide advanced communications services in our city. However,
to be commercially successful, the services should be better than what
our citizens already get for free.”
As a true public-interest, public network, a city would not have to
collect, disseminate, sell or use any personally identifiable data
about any individual network user for any purpose, unless required by
law. There should be at least one network alternative in a city that
adamantly supports a user’s right to privacy. A public, not-for-profit
network operator would have no perverse motivations to collect and sell
such information for profit or to conceal user data collection and
dissemination practices from the public.
Similarly, everyone should have at least one network alternative that
is not subject to abuse by advertisement. Many citizens would simply
prefer not to have to be exposed to unwanted ads. Some citizens and
guests view advertisement as a form of pollution, not unlike garbage
strewn on streets. Advertisement is offensive to some and is avoidable.
A Wi-Fi network option is cheap. Why pervert it? A public network
should remain free of profit motivated ads, just like our libraries and
schools.
The municipal wireless movement has an opportunity to significantly
raise the bar for electronic communications solutions. With a true
public network, modeled after public libraries, public television or
radio, we can provide everyone, everywhere in a municipality, at all
times, network connectivity many times better than dial-up, at a
fraction of the cost of dial-up, that adds no new abuse of personal
information or intrusive ads. We can radically reduce digital divides
and equitably improve economic opportunity for all. We can reduce
automobile traffic and improve the delivery of public services. All in
the spirit this country was founded on – efficient, equal respect and
opportunity for all.
When we can do that for everyone for less than $25 one time and $10 a year each, why would we settle for anything less?
By James Jones
- - - - -
James Jones is an MBA who has been a telecom optimization consultant
to San Francisco Bay Area enterprises, a financial planning manager for
Pacific Bell wire-line operations, an SBC custom contract manager, a
key contributor to Metro Ethernet pioneer Yipes, and a consultant who
helped City College of San Francisco partner with the City of San
Francisco to expand public benefit fiber networks. These comments are
excerpts from his open letter regarding San Francisco's muni Wi-Fi
efforts, which can be viewed here. Feel free also to check out his cover story on City College of San Francisco in the February 2007 issue of Communications News.
