OT: (is this OT?) ["Tempe ... isn't alone"] www.computerworld.com on municipal wifi woes

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 13:42 -0700, Joshua Zeidner wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 1:27 PM, Craig White <craig at tobyhouse.com> wrote:
> >
> >  On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 11:28 -0700, Joshua Zeidner wrote:
> >  > On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 11:11 AM, Mike Schwartz <schwartz at acm.org> wrote:
> >  >
> >  > >  [4]   "[...] the municipal Wi-Fi market isn't dying. [...] But, [...]
> >  > >  "taxpayers have lost so far." "
> >  >
> >  > >  --
> >  > >  Mike Schwartz
> >  >
> >  >   as I've noted on this list before, Muni Wifi was pronounced dead
> >  > before it was ever even born.  'Taxpayers have lost so far'?  And how
> >  > many complaints do we get on this list about COX service?  The last
> >  > thing the telcos want is a network owned by a regional municipality,
> >  > and the last thing they want is a low-cost budget option for people
> >  > who neither want or need a high-speed connection.
> >  ----
> >  Obviously the consumer was the last consideration of Tempe's Muni WiFi
> >  system and that becomes evident by the failure to launch. It's not that
> >  conceptually the idea doesn't work but conceptually, it was lacking from
> >  the word go. The city of Tempe sought only to figure out how to make it
> >  practical for an independent contractor to operate and left the issues
> >  of sales to Tempe residents to that contractor.
> 
>   As was pointed out on the AZIPA list, the contractor that was chosen
> was not even an AZ in-state contractor (as if there were none
> available).  The way the whole thing proceeded was, at the least,
> highly questionable.
> 
> >
> >  Lessig discussed the last mile and considered it from another point of
> >  view, one that municipalities can't seem to get their head around...that
> >  their own investment in the last mile of services made it a much better
> >  community for everyone and Tempe didn't make an investment, they made it
> >  a freebee for themselves so that they could use the wireless free
> >  expecting the citizens to subsidize the costs. It could be said that the
> >  city of Tempe had it backwards.
> 
>   Can we have some names here?  Who was in charge of the project?  Who
> chose the contractor?  Who was ultimately responsible for the failure?
>  Lets not talk in these comfortable vagaries here, behind the facade
> of 'government' lies people, and more importantly: culpability.
----
I could ask as I do have some connection to this but it really isn't
material as this was clearly an experiment all the way. There seems to
be a quick charge to the blame game and you're not really considering
that the mechanics of these types of technologies aren't all figured out
and some things represent a risk.

Ultimately, if a contractor can't make it pay its own way, they'll
probably end up selling it back to the city of Tempe because they have a
need to keep the system up and running.

Craig