Fault Lines Article - Google Offers Free Wifi to San Francisco?!

This is an article i wrote for fault lines the newspaper of indybay which came out today. It was written quickly, if i had had more time it would be shorter and more concise.

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It was all over the news last month, google offers to provide free wifi internet access to all of San Francisco. Where did this come from? What’s the catch? Who else other than google made and offer and how were their offers different?

The idea that the City of San Francisco should get in to the game of providing internet access has been around for a while. The PUC (Public Utilities Commission) is currently engaged in a $300,000 project to investigate a municipally owned broadband ISP. But the wireless project which got the headlines didn’t come out of the PUC project. Rather it grew out of Mayor Newsom’s Project Homeless, the non-profit which provides ‘cash not care’ to the city’s homeless population. Project Homeless had a digital divide program which was supposed to provide for computer access to the city’s homeless population. Never mind that most homeless in San Francisco get online via the already existing public libraries. Project Homeless’s work grew in to Newsom’s new pet project Tech Connect, a city run project to bring wireless to the whole city.

To start the project the city solicited proposals and comments from both community organizations and companies. The process has been fraught with problems yet many local media activist NGO’s such as Media Alliance, the Internet Archive, and SFLan participated in the process addition to some large corporations such as Motorola, Earthlink, Google, and Cisco. The scope of the comments were broad and companies and community groups proposed many solutions to providing wireless connectivity to the city.

How the networks would be built, who could use them, who would pay for them, and other questions were answered differently by every proposal. The proposals ranged from scary, Motorola proposed funding the system with grants from the Department of Homeland Security and using the wireless network to build out a network of surveillance cameras to record and monitor public spaces in the name of fighting crime and terrorism. Many of the proposals such as Earthlink’s were focused on simply extending the ISP infrastructure so that citizens of the city have a third affordable way of getting online beyond DSL and Cable Modems. Each subscriber would pay $20 a month for the right to use the system.

Google offered to provide access to everybody for with a captive portal, meaning you had to wade through google ads before you got to the internet, and the bandwidth was capped at 300kbs rather than the full 1 or 2 mbs which is possible. Google provided very few details and only released to the public an executive summary of their full proposal.

San Francisco has had a long time community wireless group who has been setting up nodes and building out a mesh (decentralized) network for years, SFLan. It’s a community lead group who has been working to provide free and open internet access to the city. The SFLan proposal differs from others in a few critical ways. With their proposal the city would own all the equipment and the network. Companies would be permitted to provide services over the network, but it would be city owned and controlled. All the technology would be based on free and open source software. Most importantly the network would be neutral to traffic. Many ISP’s today, including Comcast and SBC are fighting against the use of p2p software for music and movie downloads and voip where people are able to make cheap internet phone calls. The SFLan proposal clearly rejects a closed and private wireless system for san francisco. To fund the network SFLan proposes the city issue a bond measure rather than rely on company investments to reap subscriber fees or advertising revenue.

The Tech Connect project started out and continues to be a high profile project to boost Newsom’s political career. It does not solve the basic needs of providing computers and internet access to the city’s disadvantaged. Extending the libraries computer lab hours and facilities would have done that. What the project does open is the potential that San Francisco can have a municipally owned and controlled open communications system for all the people who live here. Some of the proposals under consideration would turn the city in to a surveillance nightmare, others would provide a 3rd company to compete with SBC and Comcast, but a some such as the SFLan proposal would be a positive step for the city.

On November 9th the Tech Connect issued a formal RFP (Request for Proposals) of companies and and community organizations to build a new wireless network for San Francisco. What ever group wins the contract the use of free software, open standards, and community control are vital.