Municipal Wireless Networks

In the years following the great 1906 earthquake and fire, the City of San Francisco built an amazing water system including a dam in the Sierras, 160 miles of pipeline, and all kinds of reservoirs and pumping stations. This gave the city a water supply that was both year-round and potable, whereas the pre-1906 supply had been neither. But it gave the city something even more important: clout. In the hills of San Mateo County and elsewhere there are "watershed lands" owned by San Francisco. Many of the cities along the 160 mile Hetch Hetchy pipeline buy their water from San Francisco. Recently when the San Francisco Giants were being lured out of down by the City of Santa Clara, it turned out that the proposed stadium's parking lot would have sat on land owned by San Francisco, and you can bet that the board of supervisors was in no mood to grant that easement! San Francisco has been the primary economic force in the development of the northern half of the state of California, but it has also wielded considerable clout in shaping the state to this city's advantage. Much of the city's clout within this state comes from our water system.

But wait, there's more. Because the city chose to build the system itself rather than hiring Bechtel or Halliburton (or their equivalents of the day), there has always been alignment between the city's clout and the city's goals. We are in charge of our own destiny. Citizens of this city know that they can expect periodic garbage strikes, power and gas price fluctuations, fly-by-night telephone and cable TV service-- but also that the water will always flow, that the cost of that water will be closely managed in the public interest, and that if they don't like the service they can "vote the rascals out". Other cities took this a step further-- in Palo Alto they operate their own power grid. Palm Springs operated their own phone company for many years (until they IPO'd it.) A city in control of its own infrastructure is a wonder to behold-- it has broader negotiating powers, can serve the needs of its citizens, can shape both the local and regional economy to its own benefit. Of course, it means hiring engineers rather than paying some middleman to do it for you. Seems to be working out rather well so far, even though there's some controversy about whether to blow up the dam for environmental safety reasons.

I am sad to report that the great vision and ambition that helped create the San Francisco water department is nowhere to be found in the current administration. My proof is that when the city decided to offer free wireless Internet service, it put the project out to bid. Never once did we consider the possibility that the same city employees who fill potholes or maintain the Municipal Railway could be trained to hang a bunch of wireless antennas all over town. We have a small amount of municipal fiber optic cable (small compared to Palo Alto's, that is, which is in turn dwarfed by Stockholm's). For a fraction of the cost of building a dam or even re-painting the Pulgas water temple, San Francisco could build its own wireless network. Instead we're outsourcing it to Earthlink and Google. Let me tell you the cost of that decision, the lost opportunities of that decision.

First off, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There will be two classes of wireless service-- first you can have free, slow, and snooped; or you can pay commercial rates to a monopoly. By "slow" I mean that the free service will be way slower than DSL, more like old-style dialup. By "snooped" I mean that if you use the free service in a coffee shop you're likely to see popup ads for businesses on the same street with you. The whole deal is a give-away to "big network", and the thing that's being given away is the eyeballs (which is what advertisers call Internet users) and cash flows.

Second, there's network neutrality. In telephone service, the government mandates that all companies providing voice-grade telephony interconnect with eachother at preset rates, thus ensuring that any phone can call any other phone and that new phone companies can enter the field to help ensure competition. In Internet service, the government mandates nothing. Recently SBC (I mean AT&T, I think, is it Wednesday?) rattled its sabre and said that Google and other content supplying companies should be paying for the use of SBC's backbone to reach SBC's eyeballs. Most of us said, uh, what? "Aren't SBC's own customers paying SBC to carry that traffic?" Some of us even said "I am not an eyeball, I am a person!" But anyway, from time to time these Internet companies shut down interconnects in hopes of creating new cash flows among eachother, and until the government regulates this, we're all at risk of higher prices or lower service with zero notice. Some well meaning democrats are trying to challenge this with "network neutrality" legislation, but this probably isn't their year. Or their decade.

San Francisco has a government, though. And if San Francisco owned and operated its own wireless Internet plant, we could mandate that any Internet company wishing to do business in this city interconnect at fair and reasonable cost to all other Internet companies wishing to do business in this city. Right now a lot of Internet traffic from one neighborhood to another flows through Palo Alto or San Jose or Sacramento, and our eyeballs are used as negotiating tokens cash flow wars. We could do away with all of that if folks like Mayor Rolph or City Engineer O'Shaughnessy (who are jointly credited with creating the San Francisco water system) were making our wireless Internet decisions. I grew up in this city, dropped out of Washington High School, and then I went off and helped a few thousand other people build the Internet. I said I was sad to report on our wireless Internet plans and that's the reason. San Francisco as a vassal. Ouch. Was never meant to be.