As a matter of conviction, the government should only get involved when:
1) An enterprise is too large or too risky for Private Enterprise ‘and’
2) There is a demonstrable public good associated with the enterprise.
or
3) There is a national security imperative

(3) is not applicable in this case. Yes, there is a demostrable public good, but it is neither too large nor too risky for Private Enterprise. GPS by contrast did have a national security imperative and in any event would have been too big/risky for private investment.

There are other options available to the municipalities that want to have ubiquitous wireless coverage and ensure that the all their citizens have access to it. I don’t know about Philadelphia specifically but i know in other jurisdictions that entrepreneurs are already evaluating and investigating means of providing this type of service. If necessary, governments can help lower the risk and drive specific behaviours by providing tax incentives or investment funds for those entrepreneurs. However, I can’t agree that the government itself should make this a public work.

i prefer the idea of a mesh network that gets routed through gateways, so you only need a few transmitters that connects with PCs and forwards their signal to the gateway and onto the internet (one on every lamp post? too expensive and unnecessary). it’s possible to monitor activity, but only if it’s sent through govt controlled servers. but thats probably the case. which is why i think the client should encrypt all traffic and be ‘anonimized’ (ie tracks leading back to the client erased).

the system must be open, so that we can see exactly what kind of information is being sent through the city net (ie if it keeps track of the origin) and what gets done with it (analyzed?).

building this network wouldn’t make internet access a right. it’s just another utility that you pay for through taxes and therefore a good idea to take advantage of.

Think about what could be the advantages first.

As someone who gets migranes when around wireless devices, this is just one more place that I am glad I don’t live in, and will never visit.

If Philadelphia were to build this hyper-wi-fi network, then how long do you think it would before its liberals demanded free, or subsized, laptops? If you have a “right” to wi-fi, then you must have a right to a laptop, no?

And because WiFi is easily excludable, there’s no reason to think a private company couldn’t set up the system and run it at a profit– or indeed why several private companies couldn’t set up competing systems; you can fit more than one access point on a street light– if the demand is really there. Letting such companies use street lights as platforms would be a good idea. But it’s not clear that having the city run the network is so good.

that being said,
i think the concerns about municipal WiFi
resulting in blocked sites or monitored traffic
have a flawed assumption
about the level of expectation of privacy.
if you want unfetered, unmonitored access,
go to the -privacy- of your own home,
rather than accessing on a -public- street.
no?

Blocking sites is hard to imagine, as no regional government will be able to control the access lists. And even if so, people just might securely tunnel their Traffic to an internet server and get the real content from there.

Target hosts blacklists and restricting access to some services won’t work, people will find ways to overcome it. The only way to really censor it, would be whitelists.

Thanks a lot for your post.