I outlined many issues I foresee with Portland's upcoming "free wifi" initiative that will likely cause it to fail, but the picture is even bleaker if it succeeds.

Consider this: the target speeds for the free Wifi are 1Mb/s down, 256Kb/s up. These speeds barely qualify as broadband. Further, these are undoubtedly "optimal" speeds, i.e. the speeds you'll never see in practice. Now consider that the majority of people will probably be willing to settle for these speeds in exchange for the low cost (i.e. hidden in your taxes) and expected ubiquity. What will this mean for existing broadband providers? Well, most likely it will mean drastically reduced customer bases and higher rates for those who remain with them. That means if you don't want the sorry-ass bandwidth the city will provide, you'd better be prepared to shell out.

This is where it gets even more interesting: why aren't we hearing screams of protest from Verizon and Qwest? This service seems to appeal directly to their customer base (DSL users) which would normally have them lobbying and buying off politicians by now. So why are they so silent? Is it because they expect that the free Wifi won't be fast enough to support technologies like VOIP and that VOIP is more of a threat to their revenue stream than the lost revenue from DSL customers? Perhaps. There's really no way of knowing at this point, but the telecom's silence on the matter is certainly curious.

Anyway, it seems pretty obvious that no matter what the outcome, free Wifi is going to have a negative impact on the deployment of true broadband (> 5Mb/s) in our area and that's good for no one.

Portland has just approved a plan to provide free wifi for "95%" of the city. This plan appears to be fundamentally flawed on both a conceptual level and likely to fail on a technical level.

First off, the idea of free internet for everyone seems like a great idea. People who can't afford cable or DSL will suddenly have decent, if not outstanding speeds (the current target is 1Mb/s up, 256Kb/s down). Of course this seems to disregard the fact that people who can't afford cable or DSL probably don't have PC's at all or have outdated PC's that don't have or support Wifi. Think Pentium desktop with Windows 95 (or worse). It ain't gonna happen for those people. What this means is that the most likely bunch of people who will "benefit" from free Wifi are the people who already have connections that are better than what the city plans to offer. I certainly wouldn't sacrifice my $60/mo 30Mbit/768Kb Comcast connection for this. Perhaps a large segment of DSL subscribers would find this a better deal, but I doubt any cable customers will. Anyway, the main point is that basically the entire city is going to subsidize internet for the people who most likely already have it (yes, that means people who can't afford internet won't get it but will help pay for the people who already have it to get it for free - good deal).

There is also the issue of security. Most people already fail miserably to understand how or why hackers target systems. Wifi adds an even greater risk to the casual user's security. How will users know that they are connected to the city's Wifi and not the access point of a malicious person? Probably they will have no way of knowing or even if they did they probably wouldn't notice anyway. This is a potential problem already, but it's at least expected that a user who's looking for an access point has some idea what SSID they are looking for. When Wifi is available on every street corner (undoubtedly with a different, meaningless SSID at each point) users will see no rhyme nor reason to the scheme and it would take a malicious person about 20 minutes to setup camp with their own access point and start phishing people using forged DNS records and sniffing packets. I can sense a good living for the semi-educated criminal element.

Finally, I have serious doubts about whether it's even going to work or be financially feasible. Unless the city is going to use some new segment of bandwidth that doesn't interfere with consumer products then most likely what we'll see is the inability of people who already have superior internet connections and access points at home to use their own equipment due to interference. Should I shroud my house in tinfoil so I can get a good connection on my laptop? If the city does use a different segment of the spectrum, then will everyone be required to buy special hardware to access it, thus raising the entry bar even higher?

Another thing that irks me is where much of the funding is coming from: Portland Public Schools and Metro. That's right: the schools that had to beg for iTax lest they have to close early are helping provide Wifi to the wealthy folks in the Pearl District. I wrote an email to some blockhead on the commission "studying" this proposal some months ago regarding this seeming anomaly and was informed that the "free" (read "paid for by everyone") Wifi would allow schools to get rid of their costly T1's. Uh yeah. Anyone who thinks that Wifi is a good substitute for a T1 (assuming you needed the T1 in the first place) is clearly unqualified to discuss the matter. Further, if reliability truly isn't an issue then there are still far less expensive, faster and more reliable alternatives available. Has anyone approached Verizon to see if FIOS could be provided to the schools? What about Comcast? I'm sure they could do it for far less than the projected $10M (HA!) the Wifi project will cost and provide superior service as well. Further, if the service came over fiber optic rather than Wifi, new and faster technologies will be easily adopted, whereas with the Wifi we'll most likely be stuck with whatever technology is cheapest at the time of deployment for the next decade. That means that by the time the project is complete it will already feel like dialup for most users.

Overall this whole thing smells fishy. The amount of publicity has been pretty minimal given the project's scope and potential impact (good or bad) on residents of Portland, and even when publicity is given, the details seem to get glossed over. I've heard next to zero debate on the topic and I suspect this was decided behind closed doors long ago. It wasn't a matter of if it was going to happen, it was simply who was going to be awarded the contract. Frankly I suspect Portland's strong desire to seem "progressive" and "innovative" has made them even more short-sighted than normal.

Hopefully we don't have to move in order to retain a decent internet connection.

Wifi-Radar