I can’t even imagine what it would cost to do something like this across the entire country…heck, even a city alone would be hugely expensive. We were looking to put in a high speed microwave network with a meshed WiFi nodal based system and it was going to run in the millions of dollars for just one county. We weren’t going to get even close to total coverage of the entire county on this network either…and it was going to be basically for the use of law enforcement and public safety, not the general public (the general public would be able to use WiFi at government facilities though).
My WAG would be (just to put it in the big cities as a unified system across the US)…well, we’d be talking billions, probably in the 10’s of billions and possibly in the 100’s, depending on how you were going to do it. And this wouldn’t just be capital costs…there would be a large recurring cost for maintenance, a recurring cost that would have to be paid by taxes, since it would be ‘free’ (thus no revenue).
Wouldn’t be WiFi then. My guess is that if they are looking at this (and I seem to recall that the FCC was looking at opening up SOME of the spectrum in formerly public broadcast range) you would probably be talking backbone, not end user. You’d still need some sort of nodal WiFi system (there are mesh WiFi systems now where you only need some of the APs to be connected to the pipe, the rest mesh and propagate the signal…you’d just need basically power. Sort of like a nodal cell system).
Building and maintaining the backbone would be expensive. Building and maintaining the access and edge layers would equally be expensive.
Man, do I want a piece of THIS contract! Where do I sign up??
Assuming this really is meant to provide “free” WiFi to the public, perhaps there could be tiered access, with higher bandwidth devices having a tax built into their price, or a monthly or yearly fee, with lower bandwidth access being free.
It does seem like, with free access, the channels would be swamped.
Naw, you’d do it like a cell phone system basically…granted, you’d need some big pipe for your backbone (assuming a unified system), but at the nodal level you’d be ok. Technically, it wouldn’t be that hard to do. It’s the cost that is staggering to me. Like I said, it’s not just the capital costs, but the maintenance costs. I’d suggest to anyone seriously thinking of this to go tour your local ISP or cellular carriers NOC and see what this would entail, assuming you would have a reasonable SLA on service for this thing. If you build it out nation wide it would be a huge upfront capital cost, and your recurring costs would be huge too. If you basically just used existing carriers and paid them, well, your capital costs would be smaller but your recurring costs would be even bigger.
(I’m making some assumptions btw…the biggest one is that you’d want a reasonable level of bandwidth available to the public, that you’d actually want a decent SLA with the public to provide decent though throttled service, and that what they are proposing is a unified system across the US, not just some spot systems in parts of some major cities, but real coverage at least in the big urban areas).
Exactly what I was going to say. How does that work in Minneapolis? Do they leave one of the three channels blank?
Plus Wifi has such a short range. It would seem to make a lot more sense to use other frequencies, or even make it a land line connection, say, over the existing phone wires.
Assuming this means free wifi access for all citizens (which may not be correct) I’m probably against it. Technology moves way too fast and it’s possible we might build a nationwide system only to find out it’s obsolete. If this is a program to ensure all citizens have some access I’d rather support a voucher system.
Tmobile covers about 70% of the country with 3G/4G speeds, but it generally only extends to larger cities. A nationwide wifi system wouldn’t need to 100% blanket the country at first. If it just started in the cities and densely populated metro areas of the 100 biggest cities that would be a good start. The 10 biggest cities/metro areas in the US alone would cover 100 million people.
Minneapolis cost $20 million to cover 59 square miles. NYC metro is 6720 square miles, so about $3 billion to cover about 18 million people. But NYC alone is about 300 square miles and 8 million people.
Apparently, so much that they never get paid off. Have you ever heard of a toll going away?
Bottom line is this: who’s gonna pay for it? And gee, it’s worked so well at the municipal levels and has such a good track record, it’s just aching for the federal government to get involved.
Yeah, it’s a nice pipe dream, but John Q. Taxpayer is gonna take it in the shorts to pay for another colossal government screwup, because that’s this will turn out to be.
If we are spending $178 billion a year on wireless data, then if this costs less it is a gain for society. I would assume that $178 billion figure in the OP includes things like the cost of phones and not just data plans.
I’ll pay a one time fee of $100 in taxes and $5-10/month for a city wide wifi system instead of $40/month every month for a mobile data plan. Besides city wide wifi would probably be faster than my data plan. But has it made people in cities like Minneapolis give up their data plans? I don’t think it has. But also factor in the fact that a truly decent, and secure wifi system would replace both a mobile data plan and a home internet plan, which can easily run $100+ a month for a single person living alone.
That’s true, but is the government planning to ride on Tmobile’s (or some other vendors) pipe, or put in pipe of their own? To put in a cellular network such as the 3G/4G network you are talking about you need a lot of backbone…and you need the support infrastructure to go with it. Is the government going to build out all of that or are they going to use some vendors pipe AND infrastructure? Either way it’s going to cost a lot even to cover large swaths of the biggest cities.
Do you have a cite for what these costs covered? $20 million seems pretty low to me, depending on what exactly we are talking about here. It’s not just the square miles, there are line of site issues and FCC licensing issues if we are talking microwave or all sort of land line issues if we are talking about glass (who’s fiber? Vendor or dark that you lay yourself?).
We looked at doing some of this stuff here in New Mexico, and in fact several counties have ‘broadband’ backbones and even WiFi (or similar technologies) to cover police and safety services…and there was/is even talk about WiFi to the public, especially some of the rural pueblos. But it’s expensive, and even if you get a grant you still have to pay the recurring costs. As an example, one county has a microwave network that goes from their admin building to one of the more rural towns (4 hops total) that is used for data and digital radio. There is no large scale edge infrastructure (i.e. no large WiFi at the nodes…yet), and the system isn’t redundant as it would need to be in order to offer some sort of reasonable SLA. It cost something like $4 million just to put in this system and it costs over $50k per year for basic maintenance (not counting the costs to monitor it…this is just basic maintenance on the equipment at a fairly low level SLA).
Why would we want the government spending for a system that is already in place? Wouldn’t a free wifi system put a whole new set of Americans out of work?
Ex Google employee here, hopefully I can clear up some things.
First of all, this is not about 2.4Ghz wifi signals, or the frequencies used for LTE and 4G data. The linked video makes this pretty clear.
This idea has been around for a couple years, and is indeed about the vacant TV airwaves linked above by davidm.
There’s a document on the Google internal network outlining how this would work (if you are a Google employee, a moma search for “CarTalk” should find it). The basic idea laid out in the document was that in the past decade or so, advances in digital signal processing have resulted in orders of magnitude increases in how much data we can pack into these longer waves used for TV. This means that with access to this spectrum, a single tower could handle all of the bandwidth of an entire city. And since these are longer wavelengths they can actually penetrate and travel far enough to cover that city geographically, or even an entire region, same way TV spectrum does now. The end result was that you could completely cover the entire US for a very cheap price. Less than Google’s current cash on hand, easily. Trying to extrapolate the cost of this from existing wifi or cell phone data plans is not valid, as these technologies require vastly more towers or hotspots for the same coverage.
Now, this sounded a little too good to be true to me as well, but I’m a software engineer, not an electrical engineer. I couldn’t tell if the underlying assumptions about bandwidth were realistic or not. Hopefully an actual ECE person can post some real figures.
I personally support the government putting this in place, but it wouldn’t be so terrible if a private company did it either. What would be a shame is if the existing telecoms block it from happening at all, just because they stand to lose out (since they sunk a ton of money into putting up all those cell towers that would be made redundant).
I see a lot of parallels with electrification, most of the electrical systems did ok at city level, but then problems like redundancy (**very **wasteful redundancy) and lack of energy on places a little bit far from the cities like farms, were not taken care properly by private industry, it took government to get the electricity to most farms and most of the food security one expects in the USA is the result of it.
I see that there are many areas in the USA that have little to no access to wifi or other internet technologies and there are areas where de facto monopolies have appeared that like the electrical companies of before don’t worry if their bottom line is limiting the progress in better technology, speed and even better prices.
In the case of WiFi I do not see the need for the implementation of this to be just a government effort, currently there are big companies like Google and Microsoft that want to be able to compete with other carriers; sure, there are business interests there, but IMHO the opposing business just want to continue gauging us.
I would prefer to let government organize some of it and keep an eye on those interests, in the end what we are looking here is on benefiting the USA in ways that I think will keep us from falling behind other nations.
