As I mentioned on Thursday, the Budget Analyst’s report on the feasability of municpally-owned and/or run wi-fi is out (you can read a PDF here). I’ve finally had a chance to read through it, and here are some highlights.

  • The report looks at three ways to get city-wide wi-fi: city-owned and -operated, some city/non-profit alliance, and the current private company plan.
  • The report estimates a city-run network would require $6-10 million to set up, and $1.5-2 million per year to run.
  • It’s not clear how much actual revenue a city-wide network would generate, although it would depend on whether or how much the city would charge to access it. The city would also save large amounts of money by using the network to aid and facilitate city services.
  • As I have been, the report is critical of the process that got us to the point of having to vote on the crappy deal the city and Earthlink have negotiated. It details the dropping of anything other than a pure wi-fi appreaoch from the RFP process, the lack of a feasibility study (for any of it), and this little gem (page 5):
    Although a Civitium white paper recommends that the City should sufficiently examine all alternative approaches to promoting digital inclusion in San Francisco, the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services moved forward with negotiations with EarthLink for the proposed wireless network without conducting a more formal analysis of the feasibility of wireless broadband or a completed study of the feasibility of wired networks.
  • The report finds a bunch of problems with the Earthlink contract, including slow speeds, expensive “digital inclusion products”, reliance on one vendor (Google, presumably) for the free service, that Earthlink would essentially saturate the entire series of bands at which wi-fi runs, and the privacy problems so thoroughly addressed by Esme Vos. It doesn’t, however, mention the lack of guaranteed coverage, which I think is a serious omission.
This report doesn’t suggest we ought to burn our free Earthlink t-shirts in the street or anything, but it does suggest the city (and more importantly, its residents) is being short-changed by the narrowly-visioned, rushed process that got us to where we are.

I have one mroe already-released report to read, and meanwhile everyone’s awaiting the fiber study that Ammiano’s been calling for for years, which, rumor has it, is sitting on a desk in DTIS, waiting for them to put together a response.