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Big Apple Day
As part of franchise negotiations between Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, and New York City officials, an agreement was reached to spend $10 million to provide “free Wi-Fi” service in some 32 parks across the metropolitan area.
But “free” access comes to those who can accomplish their wireless usage in ten-minutes, because that’s all the “free” use the two cable giants will allow non-customers on their wireless networks. Specifically, non-cable customers can access the new Wi-Fi at no charge for up to three 10-minute sessions per month. If you want more than 30 minutes a month of access, it will cost you $0.99 a day.
Broadband advocates in New York accused the Bloomberg Administration of selling out public spaces to private companies during the city’s closed-door negotiations with the two cable operators.
“There should be totally free wireless in the parks,” said City Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan). As head of the Council’s Technology in Government Committee, Brewer has made the fight for free WiFi one of her signature issues.
“This sounds like a joke,” she said when told of the deal. “I don’t understand how this works logistically. How will they track people’s use and charge everyone?”
“It’s pure bait-and-switch,” said Dana Spiegel, head of NYCwireless, a nonprofit group that has helped set up free WiFi at Bryant, Madison Square and a half-dozen other public parks.
“The way people use WiFi in public spaces is not to hop on and hop off after a few minutes,” Spiegel said. “Real people use it for a half hour or hours at a time, and that means the cable companies will end up charging them.”
The NY Post:
“We think it’s a pretty good deal,” said Mitchel Ahlbaum, general counsel at the [city’s] Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT).
He said the cable companies had wanted to charge “a substantial amount,” but eventually agreed to the minimal fee, which they insisted on so they could offer free access to their subscribers.
The thought of non-cable subscribers subsidizing free, unlimited access for Time Warner Cable and Cablevision’s broadband subscribers infuriated Spiegel:
As a tax-paying resident of NYC, I’m personally offended that DoITT would allow a CableCo to make money off of our tax-funded parks. TWC had revenue of $17.9 billion in 2009, and they are paying part of $10 million to light up NYC parks. That’s less than 0.05% of their revenue. Meanwhile, they stand to make $10’s of millions of dollars per year providing this service. (Central Park gets about 25m visitors per year, and if we ignore all other parks, and figure that fewer than half of those visitors buy one day of internet service, we get $0.99 x 10 million visitors = $10m.)
This seems to be DoITT selling out NYC residents and tax-payers. And we shouldn’t be surprised considering how DoITT and the NYC government have been in the telco’s/cableco’s back pocket for years.
A few more notes:
- If its not 24/7 Free, its not Free Wi-Fi. Period. This is clearly not “Free Wi-Fi” but rather government sanctioned subscription Wi-Fi.
- That DoITT released this on primary day was a clear attempt to bury this news because it knew it was doing wrong by residents of NYC.
- The previous Park Wi-Fi program with WiFiSalon drove that company out of business. See our post: Wi-Fi Salon Shuts Down
- What happened to DoITT’s plan to offer a more open and sustainable park Wi-Fi program? They put out an RFI last year ), and we (NYCwireless) had quite a lot to say about it (see Response to City Wireless Internet Access for New York City Parks and Other Open Spaces (DoITT RFI) and Our Take: NYC RFI on “City Wireless Internet Access for New York City Parks and Other Open Spaces”). But at least they were trying to ask the right questions.
- And what of security and privacy issues? Isn’t this deal like the city saying that we all should be giving our personal and billing information to TWC and Cablevision? What sort of protection has the city negotiated on our behalf?
