Dvorak and the myth of "free"

John Dvorak has a long tirade about municipal Wi-fi and phone companies' supposed conspiracy to kill it. I like Dvorak's curmudgeonly ways. But the risk of such muckraking is that he gets a lot of things wrong. Let's start with this:

If you take a city the size of San Francisco and give the entire population free high-speed Wi-Fi, think of the applications that will fall into place. That includes VoIP calls galore. Move over, cell phone; hello, Wi-Fi phone.

Mr. Dvorak is committing the common sin of getting people's hopes up while not doing his homework. Let's put aside the fact that the network doesn't yet exist. Here are the incorrect assertions:

1) Free wi-fi will be faster than the phone companies' wireless plans. Dvorak says:

Wi-Fi is currently at 54 Mbps and has been for years. Reaching 100 Mbps is easily achievable thanks to pre-n and other tricks. The cell connections run from 384 Kbps with EDGE up to maybe 2 Mbps on EV-DO, if you're lucky.

All true. Except that in San Francisco, the free Wi-fi offering promises only 300kbps, which is six times slower than the mobile offering above.

And keep in mind that these are theoretical numbers. Add an apartment building -- or a neighbor's microwave oven -- and Wi-fi bandwidth drops a lot. The mobile phone companies have been working around physical barriers for a lot longer than the Wi-fi folks.

In both cases, you'll be sharing that bandwidth with a few hundred thousand of your closest friends. Wi-fi only works within the city limits, while the phoneco's coverage is much broader.

Advantage: phoneco's.

2) The SF wi-fi network will support VoIP. The basic, free, ad-supported service promises around 300kbps. This is theoretically enough for a voice call -- but only if that bandwidth is consistent and glitch-free (see above).

I use Skype over my hard-wired 5-megabit connection here at Casa Republicano. It works fine in most circumstances, but breaks up with some regularity.

Now imagine a wireless network with 1/15th of that bandwidth, and shared by your neighbors. You might be able to achieve an intelligible conversation here and there, but I can't imagine anyone will depend on it.

More importantly, I suspect that free service will not even allow VoIP traffic. Did I mention that it's ad-supported? Google inserts ads into web pages. How do you insert ads into a third-party VoIP call? You don't. So it's a fair bet that Google and Earthlink will only allow traditional web surfing on the free network.

Advantage: phoneco's.

3) The public is interested in switching between mobile and wi-fi. According to this report:

The research firm Ovum predicted in a report released Tuesday that by the end of 2010 only a little more than 2 percent of all mobile subscribers, or fewer than 5.5 million people, will have purchased dual-mode services.

I dig the idea of a phone with Wi-fi capabilities, but it would have to work with a minimum of fuss. I am not gonna tweak network settings all day long. And I'm a geek! Most people's tolerance for the cutting edge is much lower than mine. Of course, these things might improve drastically. But until they do, don't expect a change in that 2% figure.

Advantage: phoneco's.

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Now, let's get to the meat of this. Is municipal Wi-fi desirable? Dvorak puts it this way:

Is the public so stupid that if given the choice between that service and free municipal Wi-Fi, they'd want the slower expensive service over the free faster service?

Probably not when the extremes are that broad, but you can be sure that the local politicians will cave on this, and we can forget free municipal Wi-Fi and Skype phones. Free is, by definition, communist! And it hurts free enterprise!

Who needs progress when you have profits?

I appreciate his snark here, but I am afraid that a) it's not faster [see above] b) it's not free and c) it's closer to communist than John thinks.

Municipal wi-fi projects have all been enormously wasteful boondoggles paid for by taxpayers, and largely unused by the public. Here are a few samples from this new report [pdf]:

• Dalton, Georgia: $171.0 million
• Tacoma, Washington: $110.9 million
• Grant County, Washington: $ 76.4 million
• Jackson, Tennessee: $ 63.7 million
• Alameda, California: $ 59.3 million
• Provo, Utah: $ 45.7 million [...]

...and these are just preliminary numbers. The funds have gone to creating new bureaucracies, which will certainly continue to grow. How many teachers you figure those numbers would pay for?

These networks do not need to perform to continue to receive funds. This allows them to work poorly while undercutting commercial offerings on price. So yes, it does hurt free enterprise, which many of us call progress.

And here in San Francisco, socialism is alive and well:

IN SAN FRANCISCO, says Ross Mirkarimi, one of 11 members of the city's elected Board of Supervisors and a co-founder of California's Green Party, “suspicion of corporate interests flows as thick as the fog.” So it has come naturally for the Board, the city's legislature, to force a delay on a plan, signed in January by the mayor, Gavin Newsom, and two technology companies, Earthlink and Google, to let the firms blanket the city with free or cheap wireless internet access by putting little “Wi-Fi” antennae on lamp-posts.

[The] reason appears to be that fog-like suspicion. If “big business”—ie, Earthlink and Google—is so keen on that wireless network, “we should consider doing it ourselves,” says Jake McGoldrick, another supervisor. He wants to study other options, including a network financed, owned and run by the city.

This is quite the opposite of Dvorak's concern. He seems to think that free-market types like me are the barrier to municipal Wi-fi. In San Francisco, the primary barrier is that the current proposal is not socialist enough.

h/t Glenn, who has more.

Comments

[Richard Bennett]

The 54 Mb/s signalling rate of 11g and 11a under best conditions isn't a throughput figure or even a "theoretical maximum" because it doesn't account for overhead in the MAC protocol.

Stations have to sense clear air for a certain amount of time before transmitting, transmissions are segmented into portions that move at different rates (PLCP vs. MAC), and frames have to be acknowledged before moving on. With all these factors taken into account, the theoretical maximum is around 26 Mb/s at the 54 Mb/s signaling rate.

This will improve in 11n, but there will still be a gap between throughput and signaling.

Voice over WiFi is a fine thing to do indoors, and not so practical on large-scale, outdoor networks.

Dvorak must have had a deadline approaching and nothing much to say this week.

[TheManTheMyth]

Something else that seems to get lost in these conversations is the complete and utter disconnect between the discussed speeds and what you actually experience. I was an early adopter of cable mode back in 1998 and have been suckered into DSL and cable several times since. In spite of adverstised 1 or 2 M download speeds, I have NEVER experienced a speed over 350kbs--and that was only in the most recent iteration of Comcast cable modem. My DSL services rarely--and I mean rarely--ever got up to much less exceeded 100 kb. This in spite of the fact that I was paying $50-$100 thinking (like a sucker) that I might actually experience the performance they were touting. Conclusion, broadband is a fraud, plain and simple. But hey, I guess I'd rather download porn at 300kb than at 50 kb, even if I am PAYING for 1.5 mb.....

[TheManTheMyth]

I'm sorry--I meant to actually tie my comment more directly into the subject of the post and got distracted by my own pissed-offedness. Where I was going with that was, if even the "evil capitalists" who presumably stand to make more money by actually living up to their promises can't be trusted to live up to their hype, what kind of a fool would believe that Jake "Mao" Mc "I hate America and don't you dare bring that battleship here because everyone knows the Japanese would have been much more friendly to gays if they had won the war and it just sucks for gays that they didn't" Goldrick is going to create an internet Nirvana?

[The Gentle Cricket]

There are few things that are better provided by the government than the private sector. They are public goods like defense and infrastructure, the kind that it is difficult if not impossible to impose an individual price to individual consumers. For products and services where a clear, individual price can be set by the market, the government shouldn't meddle. That goes for milk, automobiles, massages, and internet.

Why anyone would support increasing government control of private enterprise - without any documented success in the past of similar endeavors - is beyond me.

[poptones]

You want competition but don't want to compete?

Here's a little experience that came from living in a place that did exactly this. I live in a rural area. Back in the 90's there were a few BBS systems but essentially no internet coverage for most of the state. The local university opened up their dialup pool to all takers - if you had a computer, you could "get on the internet." It lasted less than two years before they closed it off again... why? Because offering FREE ACCESS TO THE COMMUNITY had given the community a chance to sample that which they did not know they had been missing - it proved the value of dialup service and, within weeks of the first ISP opening up in the area and the college closing off free access, there were three providers competing for that pool of users.

Most folks who have never had broadband access have no idea how having such access can improve their lives. If you really do believe in competition then you should be welcoming municipal wifi, because it will give thousands of folks who would otherwise be without it a chance to learn its value firsthand. And, if these muni services really are so terrible as you say then these angelic corporations you seem so fond of should have absolutely no problem competing with them.

Be honest about it: this isn't about government vs private, it's about economic and social class. The internet empowers people, and god forbid those who don't have the funds to prop up a telcom (or even have a bank account) should have the chance to participate in an online democracy. Keep the underlings in their place, and out of "the internets."

"In both cases, you'll be sharing that bandwidth with a few hundred thousand of your closest friends."

Not unless you live in Singapore.. probably not even then. Wifi range is - by design - quite limited, especially in a city where you are surrounded by obstacles. Perhaps if you jam "a few hundred thousand" into a park square you'll have that sort of competition, but the _reality_ is there would be, at most, several dozen nodes competing for a cell node at any given time.

[The Gentle Cricket]

I half-way agree with poptones. Having the relatively faster internet likely would open the eyes of many. My Dad decided to finally get faster internet at his home after becoming dependent upon it at work.

However, teaching this lesson to people shouldn't come at the expense of the taxpayers, so unless the whole thing will cost NOTHING to taxpayers (and I doubt the current proposal will be "free"), it shouldn't proceed.

"The internet empowers people, and god forbid those who don't have the funds...should have the chance to participate in an online democracy"

This I sincerely disagree with. Mail used to empower people. Then Telephones. But, that doesn't mean the government has a responsibility to provide these things for free, so I don't see how you assume internet should be. Besides being online is not a necessity for participating in a democracy, and even if it were, public libraries typically provide sufficient access.

[poptones]

The government doesn't provide free mail but it was, for decades, heavily subsidized. So was electricity when it became obvious half the rural south would never get it because it wasn't "cost effective" to corporate interests. There was a not inconsequential developmental boom in the rural south once the tva had made its way through. And, just like wifi now, once the government decided to step in and provide service to these disadvantaged areas there were screams of "no fair" and "we can't compete with government subsidies!"

We have among the highest rates of illegitimacy and illiteracy in the western world. Access to a diversity of views and education is desperately needed; a home with as networked computer is a home with a built-in literacy tool. Perhaps providing access to the internet won't help these folks... but if the tva is any indication then it is in the taxpayer's long term interest to get this technology as widely deployed as possible.

[DirtCrashr]

Maybe I'm just not up on the latest trends in WiFi and micro-miniaturization, but don't you have to haul around a laptop computer to make the VoIP call?