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Flagler Beach, Florida
Another public-private Wi-Fi initiative has been launched, this one in Flagler Beach, Florida, between the city government and Bright House Networks, the area’s dominant cable operator.
The Wi-Fi network will provide consistent wireless access to the Internet in the downtown business and beach areas, running approximately from Highway 100 (Moody Blvd.) south to 2nd Street and from Highway A1A (Oceanshore Blvd.) west to Flagler Avenue.
City and local tourism officials celebrated the launch of the Metro Wireless Network in Flagler Beach by suggesting it will be a convenience for tourists looking for broadband access.
“It’s also a boost for tourism because promotions that are targeted to bring visitors to the area can tell them that they can connect during their stay in town and don’t have to fish around for access,” said Doug Baxter, president of the Flagler County Chamber of Commerce & Affiliates. “Everybody is stuck to a computer these days. (The free wireless service) is a lure.”
The service is creating some mild controversy in Flagler Beach, where residents have learned “free access” is provided on an unlimited basis only to existing customers of Bright House Networks’ Road Runner broadband service.
Non-subscribers will be granted two hours access per day, but that access is contiguous, not cumulative, meaning the moment one logs into the system, the two hour allowance starts running. Checking your e-mail first thing in the morning assures when you log on later in the day, your free time will have expired and you will be told to purchase additional time.
The price?
1 hour – $1.95
1 day – $4.95
1 week – $14.95
All pay services are also sold in contiguous blocks of time. For example, the one hour access fee expires one hour after paying for the service, even if you did not use the service for an entire hour.
JJ32, commenting on The Daytona Beach News-Journal website:
How exactly is this a boon for the tourism industry when tourists can only use it for two hours, or have to pay for the service? This also isn’t unique. Other money-hungry cable companies (looking at you AT&T) have this in other cities, and it looks like Bright House Networks has now joined this notorious lot. I agree that wireless access in public areas is important, but I am tired of pro-cable company press releases saying how much they’re doing for the community, when in reality they’ve just discovered a new way to rake in revenues.
Some area businesses are also unimpressed.
Carol Fisher, owner of the BeachHouse Beanery, said she isn’t likely to promote the city’s service. That because the coffeehouse’s customers can access the wireless network she’s provided for some time, Fisher said, and there are no hoops and hurdles or fees.
City officials are widely distributing a flier explaining the service in greater detail to residents and visitors.
Defeatisms Quietly sitting back and just reading the comments this week I do see a lot of this…almost an acceptance of a different future with little fighting back. People looking so happy they can get 1 gig a month and learn to love it without overcharges something they will soon learn to hate. This is of course is mainly based on the providers knowledge that people are unwilling to go without cable TV or internet until such a time the providers throw in the towel. No subscribers make for a very bad bottom line and stockholder payouts. I almost choked… Read more »
Actually I see the introduction of bandwidth “meters” as a stated feature of routers to be an tool in your arsenal to fight against unfair metering and capping such as Time Warner Cable intends. If your router can tell you (accurately) your usage and that is lower than what TWC reports from their central office, then it’s evidence in the case against metering (in general) and specifically metering from the CO. Without meters at your location you have no tool to show your actual usage for any reason and are at the mercy of the ISP to tell you what… Read more »
Metered able routers are really no big deal what is a big deal is why? Do the manufactures know something we do not that the world is going to be capped no matter what. Is this the future? You do not need a meter of any kind if there are no caps. So the providers have already decided that caps are coming and hardware makers are going along. Then the matter of who the provider is going to listen to your meter or theirs. I bet you loose that one or at least spend a good portion of you time… Read more »
I think it’s more of consumer demand. Features like SNMP have traditionally be the purview of commercial network hardware and not consumer-level hardware. However as technology rolls on home networks are getting more and more complex and consumer-grade hardware is getting more commercial-grade features. Free firmware like Tomato and DD-WRT provide these commercial-grade features for free and they are popular. In order to capture more enthusiast market share manufacturers like Linksys and Netgear and D-Link are providing these features standard to differentiate themselves from one another and to segment the market into low-end consumer and enthusiast (more $$$). PC builders… Read more »
Easy… just change the MAC address on your wireless card before re-associating. Boom. Two more free hours!
But do you really want to mess around every two hours for something that should be 24/7?
It’d be annoying, but for those who know how to change a device’s MAC address and really want free Internet (:D) then I suppose the annoyance is very minor.
Some interesting comments here. I am wondering what logic is producing a comment that this wireless service, or any wireless service should be free 24/7. What business model supports free service 24/7??
I see a very typical pattern of uneducated and uninitiated commentary on this site, by people that have taken little time to understand the business logistics involved.
And by the way, two free hours of internet access is still two free hours of access…whether or not you like the terms.
I think the Binghamton model proves a successful, community-supported WiFi service can be sustainable and easily constructed at very low cost, with basic captive ads during login. Even if you had trouble finding less than $4,000 a month from local advertisers, if you threw it open to also taking contributions from a happy general public, I’d find it hard to believe they couldn’t keep the service breaking even, if not turning a “profit” month after month. Pitching two free hours of contiguous access makes it fine for the locals, but if I was a tourist that wanted to check in… Read more »
Hey I appreciate free service as much as anyone, but reality needs to get checked here. Ad revenue driven Wi-Fi models would be great, except that they have generally failed, for both large and small scale deployments. Remember Earthlink’s multi-market fiasco? Remember also that the folks that used Juno and NetZero free dial-up service years ago spent precious little money with the companies that advertised on those platforms. There is curently little reason to believe that ad supported Wi-Fi models will fare any different. Take a close look at NZ and Juno today, and you will see how those companies… Read more »
I suggest you read some of the articles on this site to find out just how much their costs “skyrocket” from year to year.
The fact is, their bandwidth costs are getting less and less each year, even with the increase traffic.
They cannot keep saying that their networks are expensive to run, and then spend less and less each year to maintain them, while also saying that their is no real need to upgrade their networks.
Sorry, but your statements here are materially incorrect. The fact is that as demand increases (and service requirements), costs increase. The cost per byte on the transport side may decrease, but that is different than saying that the overall costs are declining…they simply are not.
We have gone over this alot.
The amount of money that TWC is spending to maintain their network is decreasing year after year. RR Turbo customers are offsetting the lower revenue of RR Basic (or whatever they call that now). TWC has made more money, not less money as internet usage has increased.
BTW, this is only about Internet. I know the cable side is declining. That is an entirely different subject.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/time-warner-cab/
You beat me to it Ron lol. Anyways, hard to argue with facts. I think Research Rules needs to do more research especially into fiber optic bandwidth.
http://www.necus.com/companies/30/AT&T%20NEC%20Corning%20Reseachers.pdf
32 Terabits is a lot in one second, 4TB/second. I don’t think we have to worry about our bandwidth running out anytime soon with fiber optic.
You’re not including the effects of technological improvements and commoditization of computing technology. By your logic every doubling of computing power should incur a doubling of price. This doesn’t happen. Why? Because we’re able to make processors and related computer components faster AND cheaper. Network technology is not immune to this effect. Routers and transport equipment gets cheaper as it gets faster and easier to administer. The only thing that remains fairly consistent over the years is the cost to roll a truck or lay cable/fiber. With both cable and fiber we’ve developed techniques (DOCSIS 3, multi-mode) that allow us… Read more »
Earthlink was, is, and likely will always be a fiasco, regardless of whether they are involved in Wi-Fi or any other business of theirs. It was remarkable in April to have members of the media, the public, and even elected officials calling their corporate offices during the Time Warner Cable Overcharging fiasco to clarify what Earthlink was going to do (they ride along on the TWC broadband backbone to end subscribers), and the only people ever there were two or three secretaries that took messages, and nobody, and I mean nobody, ever bothered to call anyone back. You’d think when… Read more »
Anybody here think regulation is not necessary in this run away money grab?
Car analogies are great, let’s continue with yours… Gas stations (specifically) generally speaking set their prices based on two primary factors: 1) what other stations in the area are setting their prices to and 2) how much next week’s gas will cost them based on how much they sold last week. When speculation on oil prices rise, gas stations have a tendency to raise their prices for everyone (not in a tiered fashion) because whether you’re using 50 gallons or 5 in your vehicle, it’s likely to cost the gas station more money next week week for that same amount… Read more »
What you have described here are free market economics at work…very typical in function and predictability. Same for the concept of network oversubscription, practiced by every ISP and service provider in business. I’m not sure how this is a counter-argument to my assertion that if an ISP or a service provider builds out any type of network infrastructure their focus must be on revenue opportunity, and thus sustainability. I wont address the free service issue any more, as IMO free is free, regardless of what makes the “free” part useful. When you consider the business drivers behind this type of… Read more »
Sandvine? Canada’s biggest bandwidth management firm that lives or dies based on the sales of “bandwidth management solutions?” Sandvine is hardly an impartial observer of the bandwidth management question. Their marketing material hypes the problem in order to drive sales of their solution, which includes selling the tools to overcharge consumers for their service with meters and measurement tools and, more importantly for Canadians, throttles which artificially slow down certain traffic for “fair utilization.” I will be back with you about TWC and their costs. Their latest financial report was issued today and once again, their broadband profits are up…… Read more »
I’m waiting to see what that article will look like. Time Warner’s been busy upgrading my area (splitting nodes at least, still on DOCSIS 1.1) to help battle FiOS which is making a steady pace towards my home, which I’ll be getting in exchange for one of my DSL lines.
“…what factual evidence regarding TWCs expenditures (or lack thereof) support this statement?” Time Warner’s SEC filings for 2007 and 2008. I’ve previously written a personal blog posting on this a while ago which calls out specific sections of the filing as well as provides links to the original documents for your enjoyment: http://brions.blogspot.com/2009/04/reality-check-do-time-warners-new-plans.html I know Phillip has also covered it in posts long ago (around April 2009) on this site. A little digging should give you what you desire. The long and short of it is, in releases to the SEC and their shareholders TWC claims their costs are dropping… Read more »
Wasnt going to “go there” and dig into the financials, but I will later today…and then address some of your statements which made me “lol”.
That seems unlike you. Your other posts give the impression that you do as your name implies – research – and you weren’t going to dig into the financials? Interesting. Anyway, I’m not a CPA nor do I work in finance, but I am a stockholder (not in TWC) and I can read and what Landel Hobbs says in his http://a.longreply.com posts and what the company’s SEC filings say to the shareholders. They are two completely different things. Specifically, to the general public TWC can’t roll out DOCSIS 3.0 because it’s too poor without consumption based billing (CBB) so the… Read more »
“…which requires significant upgrades to CMTS hardware and the related capacity upgrades for core transport, as well as upgrades and maintenance to the HFC infrastructure to deliver the higer spec signaling that DOCSIS 3.0 requires…” I will agree with you that CMTS hardware needs to be replaced. Parts also age and need to be replaced anyway, but I have a feeling the new CMTS hardware that supports DOCSIS 3.0 is cheaper than the old 2.0 (or even 1.1) hardware. Oh and the rest of the quote is just pure BS. You need to do some research on the technology you’re… Read more »
Your “feeling” about CMTS cost is wrong, as are your statements that D3 can use existing infrastructure and spectrum. But I will help you understand what you dont. D3 CMTS hardware is significantly higher in cost compared to the systems that it replaces, both from a first box perspective, and also with regards to network capacity and spectrum utilization. Don’t spout specs to me, I am very well versed in this area. If you know anything about networks, then you know that adding enpoint capacity means nothing unless you can move that traffic at line rate across your entire infrastructure…and… Read more »
Thank you for trying to help me understand. I admit that I’m not an expert in the details of enterprise networking. I thought I would just browse around Cisco’s website and check out their CMTS hardware and become a little more familiar with it all. What I found is that their older 7206 VXR router (supporting DOCSIS 1.1 and up to 1.8 Gbps backplane capacity) had an MSRP of around $22,000. The latest 7606 router (supporting DOCSIS 3.0 and up to 480 Gbps backplane capacity) has an MSRP of $49,500, and the fastest 7609 router (up to 720 Gbps backplane… Read more »
Clearly there are costs involved with DOCSIS 3 deployment, both in hardware in-house and out in the field. But let’s not make it out to be insurmountable or represents a negative for the cable operator. Even bankrupt Charter had an aggressive DOCSIS 3 rollout schedule, and most of the other major operators are well on their way. TWC has not been among them, because the CEO doesn’t see much benefit to it, at least outside of very aggressively competitive markets. That statement, by the way, came AFTER Landel Hobbs was telling customers that if only they adopted their Internet Overcharging… Read more »
Are you saying that other cable providers, that have said it is relatively inexpensive per account to upgrade to DOCCIS 3 are lieing and the only one that is not is TWC? Or are you saying that for the past 10 years, TWC has let their networks lapse and other cable operators have not so therefore it is cheaper for them? I am not sure which one is worse. In Japan – cost for each user upgrade is in article below: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/the-cost-to-offer-the-worlds-fastest-broadband-20-per-home/ Cablevision cost per user in article below. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/cablevision-goes-for-us-broadband-speed-record/ Both of the above articles have quotes directly from the… Read more »
Internet access is becoming vital. Cities should provide it free. The consumer could buy or rent the modem and a small tax could pay for the infrastructure costs. Tell the telecos you blew it and can not be trusted, Tell em to take a hike. Without the need for large exuctive salaries and bonus as well as no need for profits to shareholders, I think it could work.
Private enterprise cannot be trusted, but government can? Heh.
It has less to do with trust, and more to do with some type of competition. Right now, most of us live in areas that have 1 cable provider and 1 DSL provider. Some other people have the choice of one of them. Having another provider, may provide the competition that is required to make service better. Let’s face it, when there is a defacto standard for anything, that thing just sits there with no inovation or upgrades until there is a real competitor. Time Warner in my area is a good example. Started off at 10Mb. Cut it all… Read more »
I dont disagree that competition in a free market is a good thing…and I understand that many are frustrated with a lack of choice when it comes to service providers. But my statement was addressing the concept that government as a service provider was a good alternative to private industry, an idea with which I disagree. Take a look at today’s headlines. When was the last time the government, local or otherwise, did anything fiscally responsible? There are a few rare exceptions, but our elected officials can barely manage thier toilet paper budgets on a monthly baisis…no thanks to the… Read more »
Then that is your choice. Go with another provider. But the choice is there. It is a good alternative when no one wants to enter the market.
I don;t think that anyone here is advocating replacing a private monopoly or duopoly with a government one. In places where there is no competition, this gives people a choice, and another provider to have access to.
Not so much a good alternative as a good supplement to a currently broken market. We’re not advocating government step in and kick out private competition. Government is the reason we ALL have electricity at our homes and interstate highways to drive on. Read your history on FDR’s Rural Electrification Administration. Government has it’s own share of problems for sure, but the big national infrastructure improvements we have faced in the past rarely got done without the help of government. So when you ask, “When was the last time the government, local or otherwise, did anything fiscally responsible?”, I’d say… Read more »
Internet access shouldn’t be free. It should be at reduced cost though. The trend in the industry is towards more expensive tiers of service even though the costs of upgrading their network was negligible. How come Japan can install 50% fiber to the the whole country and still be lower than the USA even though they offer far faster speeds? Can you say fleeced?
Well part of the reason is Japan is much smaller than the US with an incredibly high population density in metropolitan areas. People simply don’t live that far away from each other in the cities and those in the country don’t have 160Mbps Internet connections. However, it still stands as a testament to the technology – the speed is there and it is ready for residential use but the value proposition to U.S. companies like TWC and Comcast are not really there yet for the majority of their market share mostly due to distance costs (backhaul, etc.). I’m also not… Read more »
I think the comparison is valid. Yes it is a smaller country overall but like you said the high-speed service won’t be as fast out in the country. Same applies here, compare Japan’s high population density spots with US’s high population density spots and it is fair to assume we are getting fleeced. Japan is not the only country we are behind. We are like 17th overall on fiber deployment, IIRC, compared with the rest of the world and have some of the highest prices for internet access.
My point is that population density plays a huge role in cost of roll-out (like it or not). In the U.S. there is considerable long haul fiber that must be laid over large distances to serve remote metropolitan areas. In Japan there are a few long haul cables but most of them are out of the country to other countries like China. Japan is 34th overall in the world for population density (870 people per sq. mile) while the U.S. is 177th overall in the world with a population density of a mere 80 people per sq. mile. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density… Read more »
I think this is a more valid comparison than just lumping rural US areas in there.
Percent of total population in cities larger than 1,000,000
http://rankingamerica.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/chart-of-urban-populationxls.jpg
US is 44.3%
Japan is 47.8% which is not a quantum leap in difference.
I can see your point on rural areas but not in urban areas with high density populations.
Touché. However there’s still the matter of long distances of fiber to run between disparate metro areas. Los Angeles to Minneapolis to New York City are very long distances; much longer than you’d have in Japan. Those runs need to be accounted for even if you eliminate all the rural coverage completely.
Even so, that still would not make up for the relatively slow internet speeds on the coastal United States as a whole if compared.
Need I say more?
http://www.cityofflaglerbeach.com/CRA/Flagler%20Beach%20WiFi%20Coverage.jpg
These are the longest forum postings I have ever seen anywhere!
stop the cr*p! Imagine this: I paid for an hour I would like to use an hour. 5 minutes now (noon), 10 minutes later (2pm)… [^ this applies to all mobile networks. Twisted IP only the one who owns the phrase “roll over minutes” actually sells minutes — in a limited sense with inane restrictions of course.] It’s misleading to be selling time when in fact they are selling access to a window of time. Will tourists be paying for the privilege of being exposed to system rape? Or usage data mining? Will this be device agnostic? (VERY unlike fios)… Read more »