Dublin Corpo Refused City-Wide Wifi Offer?

antoinolachtnai

It has a self-funding business model. It is very difficult for municipal wi-fi (i.e., special installations on poles and buildings and all the costs that go with that) to be self-funding. Of course, it isn't essential that public services are self-funding, but it certainly helps, especially since the council has no real way of raising money for this on an ongoing basis.

The network is undoubtedly nomadic, not blanket. The same really goes for municipal wi-fi. It is expensive to get thorough coverage in anything but a relatively small area of a city or town.

I don't know of any public-access radio network in any large city anywhere in the world that offers any sort of QoS guarantee. Vodafone, Three, O2 and Meteor certainly don't.

The public bands are basically unmanaged. It's impossible to impose a high level of management upon them. Even the city council can't 'control' the network; they have to accept and deal with interference from other sources.

If you did want to impose a minimum standard of coverage (for example, 'all street areas to be covered') there would be no problem doing that with FON. It's just a matter of finding the sites and getting access to them, which you would have to do in any case.

democrates

Some of you might be interested in http://www.irishwan.ie/

I'm in sth dub using ntl and it's on and off almost daily now, I'm annoyed enough to overcome inertia at this stage.

If the government are serious about Ireland being a broadband nation with more teleworkers etc the policy needs to encourage local councils to enable community schemes. Absenting a popular mandate, the vested interests get their spoke in and we end up paying over the odds to benefit wealth concentrators.

I don't agree with the EU policy that we the people cannot organise our own facilities through our councils. By all means allow business to compete, if they're really that good the EU doesn't need to hobble the initiatives of local democratic organisations.

mayhem#

antoinolachtnai wrote:

If you did want to impose a minimum standard of coverage (for example, 'all street areas to be covered') there would be no problem doing that with FON. It's just a matter of finding the sites and getting access to them, which you would have to do in any case.

And who is going to ensure that all network components are properly managed and provide a acceptable level of uptime?

E.

cgarvey

Agreed, I think it's unrealistic to expect a community effort for a municipal network. The co-ordination of a voluntary bunch of people is hard enough, and gets harder the more there are involved. Start slapping SLAs on a provider and paying him, and a lot of people will lose interest in the "community" very quickly.

democrates

Community schemes can fill gaps where commercial providers aren't interested at a low enough price. Irishwan is not big in Dublin where there are reasonable choices already, it's bigger down the country where the available options aren't as good, and where people are more inclined to provide for themselves, just like water schemes, tv deflectors etc.

But yes, a half-baked have a go scheme won't cut it, especially if people are depending on it for teleworking, business, banking etc. Also it's not ideal to be dependant on a few volunteers, goodwill and free time can wax and wane. Otoh, some community organisations are quite vibrant and have good continuity, it's not an insurmountable problem as those other successful schemes attest.

In cases where volunteers are recompensed with a cut of the access charges, they are no longer pure volunteers in fairness, if I'm paying for something I expect a level of service so it's partially commercial. But we're not in an either/or black and white situation, a lot of people might be interested in a much cheaper service that isn't as solid as a fully commercial offering, not forgetting that commercial services aren't all rock solid anyway. I'd like to have a choice.