Gavin Newsom said yesterday, about the possibility of a municipally-owned wi-fi network,
“I’m not going to take $10 million from poor people to pay for something that a private company has offered to pay for,” he added, suggesting money for a system owned or part-owned by city government would take money from social programs.I was looking into the city’s 311 system (anybody remember it? Another one of Gavin’s big initiatives that he’s scrambling to get working by election time), and I ran across this tidbit from Matier & Ross,
Dialing for dollars: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to make reaching out to city government a bit easier with his plans for a new, centralized emergency hot line that residents would reach by dialing 311 — and he wants to raise your monthly phone bill to help pay for it.Now here’s the thing: Did he send out an RFP for the 311 system asking companies to do it for free? I’m sure that if every 311 call could have a 15 second ad at the beginning he could have gotten some company to pay for it!According to a city budget analyst’s report, the mayor is proposing to help pay for the call-in center’s $12.6 million startup next year and $8 million thereafter in annual operating expenses with a 50-cent monthly surcharge on all San Francisco phone lines.
If Newsom had proposed to make some private company responsible for the system that is supposed to be the one stop shop for San Franciscans looking for city information, with no standards for service, no guarantee that it would always be available, and allowing people willing to pay extra priority access to the number, San Franciscans would rightly react very badly. Instead, we are paying for it ourselves, because the quality of that information and the idea that everyone should have equal access to our government is a core San Francisco value.
How is the city’s wi-fi any different? It will be the primary method many of us use to engage with our city, whether to pay a parking ticket or find out the agenda of the next meeting of the Taxi Commission. Why should we be depending on some company to manage this vital channel of information? And if we are depending on them, shouldn’t we be ensuring that they’ll do a good job for everyone?
Finally, I think it’s funny that $10 million for wif-fi (that’ll pay for itself, most likely) is “taking away from poor people”, while $12.6 million is “critical“. I am not sure whether San Francisco should be running a municipal wi-fi network, but I think we need to give it a look. The more Newsom insists that we need to ram through the Earthlink deal, the more suspicious it makes me.
January 19th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Maybe if we paid Gavin a privatizer’s fee, he’d show up for Question Time!
January 19th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Good points.
hmmm.. A wifi communication system that could be designed for disaster tolerance like when all the phones and power were down in New Orleans and President Bush was still able to contact the Mayor because he had been setup with skype and wifi mesh provding internet access to a laptop… hmmm
And talking about city information services - what is the Public Health budget for flyers? What is the library budget? What does it cost to show SFGTV online and on cable?
These are all excellent ways to spend our money.
February 7th, 2007 at 9:14 am
It amazes me that cities would build a network that costs a lot of taxpayer money to build and operate. That advertising never has and never will work. All municipalities should use a model like the one that WebNet CWN uses. They work with municipalities to get access for the communications rights of way, but the fund the entire network with private money. They raise 100% of the money needed to fund the network build out, the marketing costs needed to sign up customers and all costs needed for upgrades, monitoring the network as well as technical support. It is senseless to gamble with taxpayer money to build something that requires a lot of money to operate and pay for the bandwidth that cities dont seem to realize costs a lot of money. Someone has to pay for it. Using a private company puts all of the risk and burden for profitability on private investors, not taxpayers.
Here is a link to research how they raise the money.
http://www.bbwexchange.com/meshnetworks/webnet_metro_wifi_meshnetworks_investment_opportunity.asp
Google, Earthlink or whoever are simply foolish to offer free Wi-Fi access. People are willing to pay $30 per month for access. This will be even more true as Wi-Fi cell phones become more popular.
Sincerely,
Robert Hoskins
Editor-in-Chief
Broadband Wireless Magazine
www.bbwexchange.com