11 ms·

New York is installing its promised public gigabit Wi-Fi

146 points by daegloe 11y ago

rayiner 11y ago
This makes a lot more sense than municipal wired.
- slashink 11y ago
  Genuinly interested in understanding your viewpoint. If you have some time, please elaborate. I have always been under the impression that municipal fiber to consumers has the best benefits in the long run but I might have missed something.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Municipal Fiber is a solution looking for a problem. The overwhelming trend is toward mobile. Many people, particularly lower income people, have a smart phone but no computer. At the same time, municipal Fiber is incredibly expensive. Chatanooga spent $330 million plus on their network, to wire up about 71,000 subscribers. Plus, maintenance of that infrastructure is very expensive. Given that most states and municipalities are broke, and have neglected crucial electric and water infrastructure that already exists, they can't afford to take on the cost of a Fiber network.
    - kmicklas 11y ago
      > Municipal Fiber is a solution looking for a problem. No the cable monopolies are a real problem. > The overwhelming trend is toward mobile. Yes but wired internet is never going away (largely due to physics).
    - superuser2 11y ago
      The wireless technologies we have today don't deliver anywhere close to the throughput of fiber. There's no way municipal WiFi will support every household running a couple of Netflix streams at the same time in the evening, something that's (occasionally) possible on cable infrastructure. We've already seen from dense apartment buildings that WiFi does not deal well with more than a handful of active users at close range, even on separate SSIDs. Some form of radio communication might be the answer, but there is very little unallocated bandwidth and it's bandwidth that we need.
      - rayiner 11y ago
        If we're going to spend limited public resources on building network infrastructure, the target use case shouldn't be households watching a couple of Netflix streams in the evening on their iPads. We should instead build the technologies that can deliver the broadest connectivity at the lowest cost, so people can apply for jobs, kids can do homework, send pictures to their friends or parents, etc. Wireless wins big on flexibility, and can be deployed at a cost that might allow cash-strapped municipalities to offer it as a free service. You'll never achieve that with high-cost and high-maintenance wired infrastructure.
        superuser2 11y ago
        Every New Yorker can already get good enough internet to apply for jobs and do homework, both from an ISP and a local public library. That need is already well served by current infrastructure; there's no point in duplicating it. If current options are too expensive, than subsidies would seem much simpler than new infrastructure. Municipal fiber is not proposed in places that lack internet service, it's proposed in places that lack good internet service. People are upset that aging and oversubscribed cable company infrastructure isn't good enough for their media consumption desires, and municipal fiber is the solution. Where we have problems getting people online at all is in rural areas, where 1) there are no municipalities and 2) distances are far too long for WiFi. There, the best option is low-cost point-to-point antennae on high ground. The hard part for rural Wireless ISPs has been finding someone to sell them transit at a fair price.
        Zigurd 11y ago
        I've got better internet in rural New Mexico, due to a subsidy to a local ISP to put in fiber, than I do in a town in Massachusetts that is full of people in the tech industry.
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
        MikeNomad 11y ago
        In the case of LUSFiber, part of the process included voting on a bond issue. It passed, and the build began. The effort has been successful enough to create a profit, which has been put back into the build, allowing them to reach more homes and businesses than originally planned, pay the bond off early, etc. (Source: Talking to a half-dozen of their business and residential customers in April, 2015). LUSFiber is, lacking a better term, solvent. Which cash strapped municipalities using public funds are you referring to?
    - MikeNomad 11y ago
      Things work great with LUSFiber in Lafayette, LA. Municipal Fiber is a solution to the problem of communication services monopolies. Which is why ISP lobbyists throw a lot of effort to get states to pass laws prohibiting municipal service.
PudgePacket 11y ago
Free wifi is very popular, though it makes me wonder why free wifi providers don't provide data the same way cellular networks do though 4G/LTE/etc, albeit in a limited area? I don't know about the technical limitations but it seems a solution that would cover a much larger area, and most peoples phones already have mobile data enabled. Are phones simply not set up to handle multiple mobile data networks ?
- mgraczyk 11y ago
  Without significant changes to most phones, you would need to issue SIM cards to all participants. It's not impossible to change, but the provider would need to convince 3GPP and OEM vendors to do so.
- pdabbadabba 11y ago
  Because doing so would require them to either purchase licensed spectrum (way too expensive) or start a virtual carrier (an "MVNO") and then either provide their own SIM cards and hope that users can unlock their phones, or somehow enter into a roaming agreement with the big carriers. It's radically easier to just offer Wi-Fi. There are also new Wi-Fi advances designed to reduce the friction of finding and connecting to a Wi-Fi network. A modern Wi-Fi network is also capable of dramatically greater speeds.
mizzao 11y ago
The link seems to be broken at the moment.
mwsherman 11y ago
Wifi is still not a good WAN (municipal) technology. It has never succeeded. Many NYC public parks offer free wifi and I don’t know anyone that uses it. 4G/LTE/etc is engineered for uncontrolled, outdoor spaces. It works more reliably than Wifi in that environment. Wifi’s UX is poor in that environment – you’re already connected to 4G but connecting to Wifi requires effort. And one assumes that if one is on the street, one will be walking out of range of that Wifi within a few minutes. I don’t understand the use case. (The sitting-in-Starbucks use case makes more sense.) Politicians like the sound of Wifi. Users walking down the street, by and large, ignore it.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Many cities have free WiFi in whole downtown areas, on many streets. The use case is by now more than fleshed out. Users connect to it once, and done. It’s cheap, fast, and simple. You don’t have to worry about falling back to roaming when you walk out of the range of the network, as your phone automatically stops downloading that huge file as soon as WiFi stops. But most phones have no way to mark a specific 4G network as "good roaming", cheaper than normal.
  - Nullabillity 11y ago
    > But most phones have no way to mark a specific 4G network as "good roaming", cheaper than normal. Actually, this doesn't quite seem to be the case. When I went to Denmark a couple of months ago my phone didn't consider it roaming, since I have a contract where I have the same prices there and at home.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      Yes, so the network is marked as "equal to normal". Like O2 and eplus do. But there’s no way to mark a network as better than normal. For example, if you connect to WiFi, Android will recognize it as a non-mobile network, and start doing updates, etc. If you start listening to a song via Play Music on WiFi, and then go out of range, it will automatically downgrade the quality, or stop playing and ask you if you want to continue. If you are on "NYC 4G", and go back to your own 4G network, there’s no way for Android to stop streaming that FLAC song, because it doesn’t know a way to tell that one 4G network is equivalent to WiFi, but another is not.
bigdaddywanker 11y ago
ya mums a cunt
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
qwerty_asdf 11y ago
Uh, so... how will we know it's not being spoofed? And uh... how many people will know enough to be mindful on the total lack of encryption? You know, just like at Starbucks and the like?
- argh_tfm 11y ago
  http://www.link.nyc/faq.html http://www.link.nyc/faq.html
  - qwerty_asdf 11y ago
    Question: How secure is LinkNYC Wi-Fi? Answer: The LinkNYC Private network is one of the first free municipal Wi-Fi services in the country to offer an encrypted network connection between your device and the hotspot, securing all wireless communications between devices and the Link. Gee, sounds swell! But how?
    - revelation 11y ago
      Probably, not at all. I just visited the site, and it has this extraordinary claim: In addition to Link’s features being free to the public, they also come at no cost to taxpayers. So either they have a money printing machine, or they will be doing DPI and adding in / replacing advertisements in no time.
      - enraged_camel 11y ago
        Did you read the article? "The full network will install more than 7,500 public hubs throughout the city, each replacing a pre-existing phone booth. Once completed, the hubs will also include USB device charging ports, touchscreen web browsing, and two 55-inch advertising displays. The city estimates that ads served by the new hubs will generate more than $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years."
    - codyb 11y ago
      I'm not sure about the feasibility of the encryption protocol but as an anecdotal note, a buddy of mine worked as a software engineer at Control Group and I almost considered interviewing there when I was looking around recently, so they are investing in a significant number of engineers at the very least.
ape4 11y ago
> The city estimates that ads served by the new hubs will generate more than $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years. Seems a bit optimistic to me. Are they going to inject ads in your http connection.
- revelation 11y ago
  With website visits being power-law distributed, I think the HTTP real-estate is getting somewhat scarce. They'll probably move on to DNS spoofing advertiser CDNs.
- autopov 11y ago
  "Once completed, the hubs will also include... two 55-inch advertising displays."
- michaelbuckbee 11y ago
  The physical "wifi booths" they are installing have 2 - 55" flat screen TVs that will run ads on them. Back of the napkin math time: that's $41mil a year generated over 8000ish ("over 7500" is what the official announcement said) booths, which is $5125 or just shy of $500/mo in revenue per booth to hit that target. I'm not in the physical display advertising business, but that would generally seem pretty doable given some quick research into NYC ad costs.
onion2k 11y ago
I hope the data they gather on people connecting to each gateway as they move around the city is anonymised (as much as it can be) and then made open and freely accessible. That'd be fascinating.
rgawdzik 11y ago
How would a city handle the pressure from telco's if they offer free, reliable wifi? Wouldn't all residential's switch to the free wifi, making telcos lose hundreds of thousands of customers? Has there been a case where free wifi for a city has been implemented reliably where residential stopped purchasing internet from a telco?
- Zigurd 11y ago
  Free public wifi, unless intensively engineered in cases where problems develop, can't promise 100% coverage to everyone's residence. Some people will get a windfall that effectively replaces their SP's service. Some will get only unusable connectivity. SPs have a simple way to compete: Offer service that provides a lot more bandwidth than the free service. They should do that anyway, now that Google Fiber has announced a push into some major cities.
  - RankingMember 11y ago
    Would people in the "good coverage" area be able to run repeaters for this kind of WiFi provider so that, for example, their friend across the street could be covered? I'm not familiar enough with large-scale WiFi infrastructure to know whether they have mechanisms in place to prevent such practices (or if they'd want to).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
greggman 11y ago
I'm trying to state this is a way that would just get massively downvoted. It doesn't feel to me like internet access works the same as other utilities. The need for water per individual hasn't changed much in 80 years? 100years? more? The need for electricity has gone up a little since say 1940. Natural gas, and other utilities. Maybe even streets also seem relatively static? But internet? So NYC installs gigi wifi today. In 10 years Korea and Japan and Singapore and China will have tera-wifi or peta-wifi and NYC would likely have nothing. Getting public tech services upgraded at or near the speed that tech accelerates seems highly unlikely. Having public wifi would seem like it would remove a huge incentive for anyone to come in and offer better faster service because competing with free will be hard for a very very long time. Am I wrong? Also, please don't devolve this into ISPs suck in America. I fully agree with that statement. I'm just not sure public wifi is the answer. For example in Japan it was competition that got internet faster in general. Specifically Yahoo/Softbank Japan kept undercutting the competition with faster and cheaper internet and all the other ISPs were forced to respond. That doesn't seem to happen in the USA because of poor regulations (local government approved monopolies) I'm just curious if public wifi is really the correct solution or if it's actually going to end up much worse in the long run.
- notatoad 11y ago
  I'm curious to see what sort of bandwidth "gigabit wifi" translates to in real life. In my experience with public wifi, it isn't a competitor to a wired ISP, its more of an alternative to 3G (and not as good as a 4G data connection). I'd be very surprised if a city government had found a way to make wifi feasible as a primary home or business internet connection when none of the companies working in the space couldn't. For all the "American ISPs are terrible" rhetoric, they are profit driven and possibly evil but not incompetent. I feel like if NYC actually had a technology here that could put a home ISP out of business, the current ISPs would have bought it up first. NYC's wifi will be great for residents and tourists trying to check their email or do a quick Google search from their phone, but sustained gigabit connections for every client is way too good to be true.
  - superuser2 11y ago
brooklyndude 11y ago
Companies absorbed, dead links, contracts that had to be met at midnight, one booth with wifi, zero chance of getting anything like this out into NYC wasteland (where millions live). Soon the flashing giant ad monitors will all be strewn across midtown, not a byte will make it to deep Brooklyn not a one. Do some googling on this one, follow the trail of disappearing companies involved, in the end, Google took it all over, that's the footnote, its all Google running the show now. But hey, more screens, that's Times Square. I'm ok with that. :-)

146 points by daegloe 11y ago

rayiner 11y ago

This makes a lot more sense than municipal wired.

slashink 11y ago
Genuinly interested in understanding your viewpoint. If you have some time, please elaborate. I have always been under the impression that municipal fiber to consumers has the best benefits in the long run but I might have missed something.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Municipal Fiber is a solution looking for a problem. The overwhelming trend is toward mobile. Many people, particularly lower income people, have a smart phone but no computer. At the same time, municipal Fiber is incredibly expensive. Chatanooga spent $330 million plus on their network, to wire up about 71,000 subscribers. Plus, maintenance of that infrastructure is very expensive. Given that most states and municipalities are broke, and have neglected crucial electric and water infrastructure that already exists, they can't afford to take on the cost of a Fiber network.
  - kmicklas 11y ago
    > Municipal Fiber is a solution looking for a problem. No the cable monopolies are a real problem. > The overwhelming trend is toward mobile. Yes but wired internet is never going away (largely due to physics).
  - superuser2 11y ago
    The wireless technologies we have today don't deliver anywhere close to the throughput of fiber. There's no way municipal WiFi will support every household running a couple of Netflix streams at the same time in the evening, something that's (occasionally) possible on cable infrastructure. We've already seen from dense apartment buildings that WiFi does not deal well with more than a handful of active users at close range, even on separate SSIDs. Some form of radio communication might be the answer, but there is very little unallocated bandwidth and it's bandwidth that we need.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      If we're going to spend limited public resources on building network infrastructure, the target use case shouldn't be households watching a couple of Netflix streams in the evening on their iPads. We should instead build the technologies that can deliver the broadest connectivity at the lowest cost, so people can apply for jobs, kids can do homework, send pictures to their friends or parents, etc. Wireless wins big on flexibility, and can be deployed at a cost that might allow cash-strapped municipalities to offer it as a free service. You'll never achieve that with high-cost and high-maintenance wired infrastructure.
      - superuser2 11y ago
        Every New Yorker can already get good enough internet to apply for jobs and do homework, both from an ISP and a local public library. That need is already well served by current infrastructure; there's no point in duplicating it. If current options are too expensive, than subsidies would seem much simpler than new infrastructure. Municipal fiber is not proposed in places that lack internet service, it's proposed in places that lack good internet service. People are upset that aging and oversubscribed cable company infrastructure isn't good enough for their media consumption desires, and municipal fiber is the solution. Where we have problems getting people online at all is in rural areas, where 1) there are no municipalities and 2) distances are far too long for WiFi. There, the best option is low-cost point-to-point antennae on high ground. The hard part for rural Wireless ISPs has been finding someone to sell them transit at a fair price.
        Zigurd 11y ago
        I've got better internet in rural New Mexico, due to a subsidy to a local ISP to put in fiber, than I do in a town in Massachusetts that is full of people in the tech industry.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - MikeNomad 11y ago
        In the case of LUSFiber, part of the process included voting on a bond issue. It passed, and the build began. The effort has been successful enough to create a profit, which has been put back into the build, allowing them to reach more homes and businesses than originally planned, pay the bond off early, etc. (Source: Talking to a half-dozen of their business and residential customers in April, 2015). LUSFiber is, lacking a better term, solvent. Which cash strapped municipalities using public funds are you referring to?
  - MikeNomad 11y ago
    Things work great with LUSFiber in Lafayette, LA. Municipal Fiber is a solution to the problem of communication services monopolies. Which is why ISP lobbyists throw a lot of effort to get states to pass laws prohibiting municipal service.

PudgePacket 11y ago

Free wifi is very popular, though it makes me wonder why free wifi providers don't provide data the same way cellular networks do though 4G/LTE/etc, albeit in a limited area? I don't know about the technical limitations but it seems a solution that would cover a much larger area, and most peoples phones already have mobile data enabled. Are phones simply not set up to handle multiple mobile data networks ?

mgraczyk 11y ago
Without significant changes to most phones, you would need to issue SIM cards to all participants. It's not impossible to change, but the provider would need to convince 3GPP and OEM vendors to do so.
pdabbadabba 11y ago
Because doing so would require them to either purchase licensed spectrum (way too expensive) or start a virtual carrier (an "MVNO") and then either provide their own SIM cards and hope that users can unlock their phones, or somehow enter into a roaming agreement with the big carriers. It's radically easier to just offer Wi-Fi. There are also new Wi-Fi advances designed to reduce the friction of finding and connecting to a Wi-Fi network. A modern Wi-Fi network is also capable of dramatically greater speeds.

mizzao 11y ago

The link seems to be broken at the moment.

mwsherman 11y ago

Wifi is still not a good WAN (municipal) technology. It has never succeeded. Many NYC public parks offer free wifi and I don’t know anyone that uses it. 4G/LTE/etc is engineered for uncontrolled, outdoor spaces. It works more reliably than Wifi in that environment. Wifi’s UX is poor in that environment – you’re already connected to 4G but connecting to Wifi requires effort. And one assumes that if one is on the street, one will be walking out of range of that Wifi within a few minutes. I don’t understand the use case. (The sitting-in-Starbucks use case makes more sense.) Politicians like the sound of Wifi. Users walking down the street, by and large, ignore it.

kuschku 11y ago
Many cities have free WiFi in whole downtown areas, on many streets. The use case is by now more than fleshed out. Users connect to it once, and done. It’s cheap, fast, and simple. You don’t have to worry about falling back to roaming when you walk out of the range of the network, as your phone automatically stops downloading that huge file as soon as WiFi stops. But most phones have no way to mark a specific 4G network as "good roaming", cheaper than normal.
- Nullabillity 11y ago
  > But most phones have no way to mark a specific 4G network as "good roaming", cheaper than normal. Actually, this doesn't quite seem to be the case. When I went to Denmark a couple of months ago my phone didn't consider it roaming, since I have a contract where I have the same prices there and at home.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Yes, so the network is marked as "equal to normal". Like O2 and eplus do. But there’s no way to mark a network as better than normal. For example, if you connect to WiFi, Android will recognize it as a non-mobile network, and start doing updates, etc. If you start listening to a song via Play Music on WiFi, and then go out of range, it will automatically downgrade the quality, or stop playing and ask you if you want to continue. If you are on "NYC 4G", and go back to your own 4G network, there’s no way for Android to stop streaming that FLAC song, because it doesn’t know a way to tell that one 4G network is equivalent to WiFi, but another is not.

bigdaddywanker 11y ago

ya mums a cunt

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

qwerty_asdf 11y ago

Uh, so... how will we know it's not being spoofed? And uh... how many people will know enough to be mindful on the total lack of encryption? You know, just like at Starbucks and the like?

argh_tfm 11y ago
http://www.link.nyc/faq.html http://www.link.nyc/faq.html
- qwerty_asdf 11y ago
  Question: How secure is LinkNYC Wi-Fi? Answer: The LinkNYC Private network is one of the first free municipal Wi-Fi services in the country to offer an encrypted network connection between your device and the hotspot, securing all wireless communications between devices and the Link. Gee, sounds swell! But how?
  - revelation 11y ago
    Probably, not at all. I just visited the site, and it has this extraordinary claim: In addition to Link’s features being free to the public, they also come at no cost to taxpayers. So either they have a money printing machine, or they will be doing DPI and adding in / replacing advertisements in no time.
    - enraged_camel 11y ago
      Did you read the article? "The full network will install more than 7,500 public hubs throughout the city, each replacing a pre-existing phone booth. Once completed, the hubs will also include USB device charging ports, touchscreen web browsing, and two 55-inch advertising displays. The city estimates that ads served by the new hubs will generate more than $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years."
  - codyb 11y ago
    I'm not sure about the feasibility of the encryption protocol but as an anecdotal note, a buddy of mine worked as a software engineer at Control Group and I almost considered interviewing there when I was looking around recently, so they are investing in a significant number of engineers at the very least.

ape4 11y ago

> The city estimates that ads served by the new hubs will generate more than $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years. Seems a bit optimistic to me. Are they going to inject ads in your http connection.

revelation 11y ago
With website visits being power-law distributed, I think the HTTP real-estate is getting somewhat scarce. They'll probably move on to DNS spoofing advertiser CDNs.
autopov 11y ago
"Once completed, the hubs will also include... two 55-inch advertising displays."
michaelbuckbee 11y ago
The physical "wifi booths" they are installing have 2 - 55" flat screen TVs that will run ads on them. Back of the napkin math time: that's $41mil a year generated over 8000ish ("over 7500" is what the official announcement said) booths, which is $5125 or just shy of $500/mo in revenue per booth to hit that target. I'm not in the physical display advertising business, but that would generally seem pretty doable given some quick research into NYC ad costs.

onion2k 11y ago

I hope the data they gather on people connecting to each gateway as they move around the city is anonymised (as much as it can be) and then made open and freely accessible. That'd be fascinating.

rgawdzik 11y ago

How would a city handle the pressure from telco's if they offer free, reliable wifi? Wouldn't all residential's switch to the free wifi, making telcos lose hundreds of thousands of customers? Has there been a case where free wifi for a city has been implemented reliably where residential stopped purchasing internet from a telco?

Zigurd 11y ago
Free public wifi, unless intensively engineered in cases where problems develop, can't promise 100% coverage to everyone's residence. Some people will get a windfall that effectively replaces their SP's service. Some will get only unusable connectivity. SPs have a simple way to compete: Offer service that provides a lot more bandwidth than the free service. They should do that anyway, now that Google Fiber has announced a push into some major cities.
- RankingMember 11y ago
  Would people in the "good coverage" area be able to run repeaters for this kind of WiFi provider so that, for example, their friend across the street could be covered? I'm not familiar enough with large-scale WiFi infrastructure to know whether they have mechanisms in place to prevent such practices (or if they'd want to).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

greggman 11y ago

I'm trying to state this is a way that would just get massively downvoted. It doesn't feel to me like internet access works the same as other utilities. The need for water per individual hasn't changed much in 80 years? 100years? more? The need for electricity has gone up a little since say 1940. Natural gas, and other utilities. Maybe even streets also seem relatively static? But internet? So NYC installs gigi wifi today. In 10 years Korea and Japan and Singapore and China will have tera-wifi or peta-wifi and NYC would likely have nothing. Getting public tech services upgraded at or near the speed that tech accelerates seems highly unlikely. Having public wifi would seem like it would remove a huge incentive for anyone to come in and offer better faster service because competing with free will be hard for a very very long time. Am I wrong? Also, please don't devolve this into ISPs suck in America. I fully agree with that statement. I'm just not sure public wifi is the answer. For example in Japan it was competition that got internet faster in general. Specifically Yahoo/Softbank Japan kept undercutting the competition with faster and cheaper internet and all the other ISPs were forced to respond. That doesn't seem to happen in the USA because of poor regulations (local government approved monopolies) I'm just curious if public wifi is really the correct solution or if it's actually going to end up much worse in the long run.

notatoad 11y ago
I'm curious to see what sort of bandwidth "gigabit wifi" translates to in real life. In my experience with public wifi, it isn't a competitor to a wired ISP, its more of an alternative to 3G (and not as good as a 4G data connection). I'd be very surprised if a city government had found a way to make wifi feasible as a primary home or business internet connection when none of the companies working in the space couldn't. For all the "American ISPs are terrible" rhetoric, they are profit driven and possibly evil but not incompetent. I feel like if NYC actually had a technology here that could put a home ISP out of business, the current ISPs would have bought it up first. NYC's wifi will be great for residents and tourists trying to check their email or do a quick Google search from their phone, but sustained gigabit connections for every client is way too good to be true.
- superuser2 11y ago

brooklyndude 11y ago

Companies absorbed, dead links, contracts that had to be met at midnight, one booth with wifi, zero chance of getting anything like this out into NYC wasteland (where millions live). Soon the flashing giant ad monitors will all be strewn across midtown, not a byte will make it to deep Brooklyn not a one. Do some googling on this one, follow the trail of disappearing companies involved, in the end, Google took it all over, that's the footnote, its all Google running the show now. But hey, more screens, that's Times Square. I'm ok with that. :-)