Over in Greensboro Ed Cone posted an item about Winston-Salem/Forsyth County getting ready to offer municipal wi-fi and lamenting the lack of such an effort in Greensboro. Much discussion ensued and it’s one of the few times I can remember reading anyone write something re. technology that states Winston-Salem is ahead of Greensboro.
Ed also says that Greensboro’s downtown wireless corridor isn’t the same thing as municipal wi-fi (too limited) and I’d agree; we also have a free wi-fi corridor on Fourth Street in W-S but what they’re talking about doing is a much bigger deal. Hopefully it works.
WinstonNet is the group behind the wi-fi effort.
**Update: Check out DarkMoon’s analysis of the deal here.
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Befuddled 
I wrote an analysis on it.
http://life.firelace.com/2006/10/analysis_of_winstonsalems_unwi_1.html
I’m going to point out that the 4th street thing? Umm.. Let’s just say that the vendors weren’t too happy about that project.
I’m hoping this city-wide thing works out but I’m afraid that they don’t have any RF experience and as such, they’re going to make some fatal judgments. I’ve warned against public safety over WiFi before with GSO. I’ll give fair warning here also.
Using public spectrum to run any sort of communications for public safety is .. well… not intelligent. It doesn’t take much to knock out public spectrum (because it is public) and response time in public safety is key.
Otherwise, I think that the idea is a swell one, although late in the municipal wireless game not as useful as people make it out to be (businesses don’t suddenly come due to you having WiFi access. It’s more like an amenity at a hotel).
DM,
Great analysis. I’m not enough of a technologist to really have a strong opinion about the tech side, but I do agree with you re. the fact that having wi-fi will not improve citizen/govt. communication in and of itself.
A couple of questions:
1. Can you fill me in on the Fourth Street vendor dissatisfaction?
2. Do you foresee wi-fi really taking off when we have more devices besides laptops that will tap into the networks? I’m thinking of devices that might utilize wi-fi to enable Skype calls for example.
#2. Maybe. You’re still limited by bandwidth.
Let me put it this way in theoretical terms. Note that there is no way you can achieve this type of full bandwidth. Between overhead and interference, average is about 70% output. One single full channel in 802.11b network can support 11Mbps or 11264k. An average VoIP call such as Skype or Vonage or whatever is about 90k. That puts you at 125 calls for 1 channel.
That’s not bad right? Well, maybe. You don’t account for the fact that usually you have more surfing. So then you need prioritize which packets are higher priority (voice over mail over web, etc).
Then you get into how many channels will interfere with other channels (since there is bleed over) and also if you have a G network, and you have B clients, then the network degrades. That’s all network side. We haven’t even gotten into outside interference.
I’m making the assumption that Skype only uses 90k bw also. I don’t know offhand what the overhead is. More quality = more bandwidth = less users. And you have to remember that it’s public spectrum so any other device in it will interfere with your network and vice versa. And there’s no stopping it since it is public band.
I think there will be more toys, for sure. Useful? definitely. But if buildouts don’t take this into account, they’re not doing due dilligence.