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Wireless Networking The Internet Hardware

Nation's First City-Wide WiFi Network Completed 163

Posted by timothy from the depends-who's-defining-things dept.
According to a reader rockwellpa, Grand Haven, Michigan has recently completed the United States' first truly city-wide WiFi nework. According to the press release, "Other cities have announced intent to build similar networks or have announced partial deployments; in contrast, the Grand Haven implementation, by Ottawa Wireless Inc., is the first full and complete city-wide WiFi deployment in the country. 'As the first WiFi city in America, Grand Haven has truly lived up to its name in the Internet era, as we now allow anyone anywhere to connect to the Internet and roam the city and waterways in a completely secure computing environment'"
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Nation's First City-Wide WiFi Network Completed More

Nation's First City-Wide WiFi Network Completed

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  • Public Access Locations (Score:2, Insightful)

    by artlu ( 265391 )
    Does anyone know the logistics of where they placed the access points? Were they connected to telephone polls or traffic lights? How about weather? Michigan does get snow and if the access points are outside, what type of protection do they have.
    Finally, if one access point crashes do the rest break as well?

    GroupShares Inc. [groupshares.com] - A Free and Interactive Stock Market Community
    • i live about 40 minutes away, so i will have to take my wifi scanner and see how that goes...yes, there is alot of snow here, so who knows whats gonna happen comes winter, could everything freeze? who knows, we will just have to wait. the rest of the country will most likely use this as testing

    • Re:Public Access Locations (Score:5, Informative)

      by Syncrou ( 179670 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @08:02PM (#9855123) Homepage
      They attached them to telephone poles across the city. They're hoping to widen the range over the next couple of years. One cool thing: You can surf the web in your boat off the coast of Lake Michigan. I forget how far off the beach, but I want to try it.
    • Illinois also gets snow, though not as much as Michigan, so our community wireless project makes a point of waterproofing nodes. The card is enclosed in a really tough container, and they're using a combination of electrical tape and plumbers goo to waterproof the connections.
    • The entire time I read the post all I could think is how easy it'd be to cover a small city with WiFi. Then I read the article:
      "...the system uses several hundred WiFi (802.11a, b, g) radios strategically located upon the city infrastructure to blanket its six square miles..."
      SIX SQUARE MILES?!? That's not a city, that's a oversized postage stamp. I'm not impressed, how many of is, or for that matter own computers?
    • Here's a picture I took of one of the access points [img36.exs.cx] a few months ago. They are in NEMA weatherproof enclosures, with a support bar attached to an omnidirectional whip antenna (quite ugly - unfortunately I couldn't fit it all in the same picture). In addition, there's a flat directional antenna that obviously connects to another access point. I have also discovered the majority of the access points since they started to appear last fall, and have posted them to WiGLE [wigle.net].

  • How does this affect local ISP? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rice0067 ( 220981 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:10PM (#9854915)
    I think the idea of city wide WIFI is nice, but how is it paid for? Do people still have cable modem at home? (or that silly phone line thing)
    With whole city wifi.. will people even use land lines for home telephone?

    • With VOIP over WiFi still in it's infancy, that's highly unlikely at the moment, but the potential is there.

      The question is: Will the Telcos allow such a thing to happen?
      • The question is: Will the Telcos allow such a thing to happen?

        I know in Utah, (of all places where the vile Orin Hatch is elected into office by Republician Religious sheep (yeah yeah, Flamebait I know)), both the local phone company (QWest) and Comcast are loobying HARD in the Utah legeslature to stop UTOPIA (a coallition of local cities to impliemnt FTTH).

        bout the only good thing Provo is doing is implimenting there own seperate FTTH system that is a basis for the more generalized UTOPIA FTTH that o
    • I suspect it is a pay service, similar to "T Mobile Hotspots" and hotel wi-fi. But if you're always getting reception, i imagine it would be easy for anyone to crack.
      • In Philadelphia they have several hotspots now that are completely free to use and all have pretty decent bandwidth. The two most notable areas are Love Park and Reading Terminal, both which have wifi supported I guess by taxes. Each area has big signs letting people know it too, and how to set it up. Its pretty sweet, the only down side is that if I wanted to do something illegal, then what better area then a free public access point used by tons of people in the center of a very large city everyday. If yo
    • I personally think it would be great if somehow you paid whichever company provided the WIFI that you can access from you house (probably where you would use the "internet" most.) Then, if you feel the need to roam about the city and use internet, you would have free roaming access. This way it remains economically viable for the service to be provided, and convenient for people to use.
      I would be against this sort of thing being provided by the local government. This is not the purpose of government.

      • Re:How does this affect local ISP? (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        OK, I'll bite. What is the purpose of government?

      • Re:How does this affect local ISP? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Kphrak ( 230261 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @08:25PM (#9855222) Homepage

        I would be against this sort of thing being provided by the local government. This is not the purpose of government.

        The local government is actually the perfect place for it if enough people in the city actually want it. There is nothing wrong with a small government, participated in at a local level, voting for a convenience for the city.

        Of course, the above is in a perfect world. City governments are often owned by special interests such as corporations, or even a local mafia -- both of whom try to get the voted-on service outsourced to themselves. In my city, the local city council often votes for the most expensive and least useful things it can get (right now, for instance, there's a movement to get a major league baseball team, and a multi-billion-dollar project to bury all the reservoirs in a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 just got cancelled -- but not after spending 4 million dollars on preparation for it). It really depends on how involved the citizens of the city were in the decision.

        • Right - as long as the government emplementation actually costs less than private emplementation.

          The trouble is that it is much more expensive to PAY for WiFi than it is to install it.

          In other words, other overhead of billing and collecting the money exceeds the cost of service - that is generally a good time for government to provide a service.

          there is another argument for ubiquitous serviec.

          Trash collection - when private - everybody has a choice either to pay for pickup - or (find some other way to g
      • Now I wasn't meaning to Troll by saying that providing WIFI was not the purpose of government.
        That being said, its like electricity. Providing of electricity is also not the purpose of government. Government is for the protection of citizens and the facilitation of trade. (and a few other things like social services that no one else would do because its not profitable.) Like education.
        On the other hand. If, as one poster hinted at, all the citizens go together and said that the city should provide this out
        • (and a few other things like social services that no one else would do because its not profitable.) Like education.

          Uh... I believe the purpose of public education was to make sure everyone had access to education, not because it wasn't profitable. There are plenty of private schools that do/could make a fortune if they wanted to. (Especially in areas where the public schools aren't so great) It's also the same idea that's behind universal health care - it's a basic need that everyone should have access to

    • With whole city wifi.. will people even use land lines for home telephone?

      no, they wont
      they will use their wifi phones

      the first comment was nice, second third ok...fourth downright retarded
    • Do people still have cable modem at home? (or that silly phone line thing)

      Silly phone line thing as in DSL or silly phone line thing as in POTS modem?
    • Some courteous RTFA quotes:
      1. "Some hotels and marinas subsidize the wireless service, offering it free to guests."

      2. "Monthly prices for always-on broadband Internet starts at $19.99 for 256 kbps, and unlimited mobile VoIP calling is $29.99. Connections up to 1 Mbps and per-day pricing options are also available."

      take care.

  • Releasing viruses into the wild... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NeoGeo64 ( 672698 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:10PM (#9854918) Homepage Journal
    This town will soon become a favorite stop for people looking to anonymously release viruses into the wild.

    • Haven for Computer Crime (Score:5, Funny)

      by iendedi ( 687301 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:26PM (#9854993) Journal
      In other news, Grand Haven, Michigan has been experiencing an unusually large growth rate in specialty computer stores, comic book stores and other geeky novelty stores. Asked about this unusual growth, mayor Gaven Hrand replied, "We don't understand it either, but we have noticed that most of the operators of these stores know each other and lug around quite a bit of equipment when they aren't watching their shops."

      On an unrelated but also interesting note, the FBI recently decided to place a district office in Grand Haven, citing the nice weather.

    • Re:Releasing viruses into the wild... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Which will in turn be used as a means of installing a London-esque CCTV system. "Okay, our logs show that the virus was sent from the corner of 1st and 8th at 12:04PM. Let's go back to our surveillance video. Oh, yeah..we have a plate number now."

    • I doubt it. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by twitter ( 104583 )
      Anonymous? I don't think so. It's not a free service, so I imagine they have a client that identifies the user for billing purposes. That's no more anonymous than dialup or cable operations. Nor are those other more expensive alternatives any more secure. As the waves of spam, virus and malware continue to be released without any accountability at all, it's clear that all commercial and government attempts to follow users around only affect honest people. Real criminals have armies of broken Windoze b
    • Why would virus writers bother to go to Michigan when there are coffee shops, etc, with free, anonymous access? (Of course, I'm sure that nobody on Slashdot would ever think of wardriving so we won't even consider that.)
    • Nah, they're just there to see the Fountain [grandhaven.com]...

  • LOL (Score:5, Funny)

    by Beuno ( 740018 ) <argentinaNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:11PM (#9854923) Homepage
    "completely secure computing environment". Hahhahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahaha... *whipes tears*

    • No Kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DaedalusLogic ( 449896 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:24PM (#9854985)
      Isn't it inherently insecure since the public can access it? What are they going to do... register MAC addresses of adapters? What are they going to do when those are spoofed? I think that wide ranging public access to the internet via 802.11 anything is a bad idea. Is anyone else with me on this? What's the motivation for doing this to an entire town?
    • Does it just mean they're using WEP to protect connections?
      Can anybody send your wireless device an unsolicited ping or not?
      Is that different for traffic from the outside world vs. other wireless nodes?
      If your computer's not secure, then either your wireless network isn't "secure", or else your wireless network is actively blocking traffic from the outside world using a firewall and also blocking user-to-user traffic that doesn't go through the firewall.

      MS-DOS was perfectly secure, because its securi

  • Is it me, or is this service really... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iammaxus ( 683241 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:14PM (#9854937)
    ... slow. If you go to http://www.ottawawireless.net/services/pricing.htm l, you see that they offer 256kbps for regular users. That's only about 5 times dialup. With modern websites, that really doesnt cut it.
    • I think the big feature of WiFi is the Wi part.

      In any case the "modern websites" demand is sorta baseless - what features of modern websites demands high bandwidth? Flash intros? Unless you're downloading ISOs or getting Windows Update files, it really is barely different.
    • I don't know, but if I needed this service, I'd probably still have my cable internet at home for all my downloading and stuff. This is just going to let me conduct my business activities anywhere.
    • New developers... Well actually I guess there is an exception, and from that I can infer that you're browsing for a whole lotta porn!
      • Maybe to web developers like me (and you?) a website means an bunch of text based markup and stylesheets with the occasional image, but for the average user, it doesn't matter wether the site is flash based or not, wether it uses a ridiculous amount of images that it shouldn't or that it contains high bandwidth video, they just want to see the website quickly. 256 kbps really isn't fast anymore.
    • what? we're talking about 256Kb pretty much anywhere. that's amazing. you can keep struggling with your flash intros and animated gif laden pages, if you like - me, i'll be doing streaming full motion video chat (using iChat, of course). i've done it over worse links. that's huge.
    • It still beats dial up. Just because you and I have brioadband, does not mean everyone does.

      besides, for this and VoIP, you can fully eliminate your local phone company. For many, this is a Really Big Deal(tm).

      If you are stuck in an apartment complex w/really old and crappy phone lines, this 256 will kick arse.

  • Breaking monopoly (Score:3, Informative)

    by usefool ( 798755 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:15PM (#9854940) Homepage
    always-on broadband Internet starts at $19.99 for 256 kbps, and unlimited mobile VoIP calling is $29.99

    In countries where there is only one telo, this kind of deployment might be one way to get around the telephone grid and compete in the once-me-only market.

  • how is it secure? is ipsec required to join and use the wireless network?
    • how is it secure?

      It identifies the user and makes sure they pay! In the future, that identity and network control will be used to stop music sharing, broadcast flag violating, free software terrorists and force them to join the Napster paying slaves on Windoze only intranets with great big flashing Adverts taking up 1/2 of your bandwith and no mute or off buttons. Ah, the future, it's so much like the broadcasting present and past. 24/7, buy more soap!

    • the subscriptions might be secure, but what stops someone stealing all those roaming microwaves and using them to cook lunch?
  • 616-842-2763 and 847-549-1677

    VoIP for $30 a month? you'd better hope that's unlimitted.

  • So it begins (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Fryth ( 468689 )
    As more cities follow suit, and wireless bandwidth and security are improved, we are going to be living in a connected world beyond yours or my dreams. Mark my words.

  • Not True (Score:5, Informative)

    by JonahDark1 ( 63703 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:22PM (#9854972)
    Aspen Colorado had the first city-wide WiFi Network running in 1997. It was a private network built by Sun Microsystems. It was running 802.11 (not a/b/g) at 2Mbps.

  • Great. Those ruffians to the North in Muskegon are going to infest Grand Haven now.

  • Network Neighborhood? (Score:5, Funny)

    by moankey ( 142715 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:27PM (#9854997)
    So how many computers will be cached up in my network neighborhood under "Workgroup" or "MSHome"?
    • I think the more pertinant question is, how many of those will have their default password set to "password", and even more pertinant, how quickly can I map out and search those drives for, ahem, certain, er, uh, ah...porn...

      ...

      I know I know, it's shameless! but still! Gigs and gigs of porn, warez, all for the taking! But there are OTHER applications, you know...

      You know, if most of that town is running win boxes, and insecure ones at that, with a perminant internet connection through a wireless

  • Vague press release (Score:3, Insightful)

    by StateOfTheUnion ( 762194 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:29PM (#9855000) Homepage
    The press release seems rather lacking. It doesn't say anything about whether the intention of this project was to get wireless into homes or residential areas or not. It only cites an area of 6 square miles as the goal. Was this in residential, government, or business areas? Is this the entire city limits or a small portion? Is it only in public areas (streets, parks & goverement buildings)? Are there holes in the coverage? 'Citywide' could mean that a significant areas is covered across the city but that there might still be significant gaps in the coverage.

    I for one am unimpressed. The press release is simply too ambiguous.

    • this answered a lot of the questions i had...http://www.walkersands.com/Grand-Haven-WiFi- FAQ.htm [walkersands.com] what kinda web publisher puts the FAQ at the top, above the title in "ad space"?

      makes it very skippable.
    • The city has 12000 people. That's half the population of Ithaca NY, so 6 square miles sounds realistic for the whole city (that's roughly 2.5 miles square) - it's certainly bigger than just downtown business area.

      But yeah, I couldn't tell if it was free for the residents, or cheap for the residents, and if it was free for visitors (implied by the "several hotels sponsoring it" part) what were they charging residents for - faster connections?

      And if it's free, what happens when visitors (or residents, but

  • Not so fast (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:34PM (#9855026)
    I live in Chaska Minnesota and we have had city run wifi internet access for a few months now. It's run by the City and it costs $15.99 a month. If you'd like more information, check out http://www.chaska.net/
  • Imagine a volunteer adhoc city/country/world-wide wifi network with spare net bandwidth donated by thousends of people from homes to universities to city authorities and decent wifi bandwidth, signal and security. Now imagine everyone with really cheap massproduced wifi-PDAs or just wifi-enabled phones and laptops that could handle VOIP and web/email. And finally imagine the icing on the cake - the pissed off mobile phone carriers' faces :) oh that would be so good:) one day it will surely be a reality?
    • Imagine a volunteer adhoc city/country/world-wide wifi network with spare net bandwidth donated by thousends of people from homes [...]

      Imagine the bills to and/or disconnects of the home "donors" for violations of their Terms of Service agreements.

      If you wanna do this you need to do your interconnect by peering with a backbone provider - which means paying a fee for their long-haul if you don't have long-haul facilities of your own (like among three or more well-separated major cities) to contribute to t
    • It's being attempted [seattlewireless.net] in Seattle.
    • ...but you're not the only one.

      I'd really love to see this happen. Forget connecting to the "real" Internet; we could form a separate "wireless Internet". We have the routing protocols and such that would be necessary for such a dynamic network. What we don't have, for the most part, is the hardware. WiFi is pretty short range, unless you know where you're aiming. It would require massive coordination of effort and still a fairly high population density. Germany (or Japan, I suppose) would be a good countr

  • Free? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by toetagger1 ( 795806 )
    Do they also provide free Electricyt, Phone, Water, and Garbage Removal up there? I don't understand why people think that having FREE wirless internet access is something that is a required thing of the future. It wouldn't surprise me of seeing wirless companies picking up the trend and offering wirless internet service (either through the same band as the voice service, or a different one), and people would pay a monthly subscrcription. That sounds more plausible than FREE.

  • Not even the second (Score:3, Informative)

    by voidref ( 9482 ) <voidref@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:49PM (#9855083) Journal
    Half Moon Bay, in California was had this at least a year ago, and there was even a story on the Science Channel about it!


  • Gee, a bunch of stories seem to have disappeared.
  • Champaign-Urbana also has a community wireless project http://www.cuwireless.net/ [cuwireless.net]. We're thinking hard about some of the issues brought up in other posts, e.g. security and other ISPs. Providing access to our community is important to us, but we're not oblivious to the risk of abuse. We're currently discussing some possible approaches to addressing this, though I don't think that there will be any silver bullets.

  • Big deal! (Score:3, Informative)

    by MSBob ( 307239 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @07:55PM (#9855103)
    Fredericton (capital of Canadian province of New Brunswick) has WiFi acces throughout the city and best of all it's free! http://www.muniwireless.com/archives/000169.html
  • this is pretty interesting, i'd like to see this kind of thing happen in more and more cities across the continent.

    there seems to be a preconception among some of the posters that this system runs on some ad-hoc of residential equipment, essentially turning the place into a big lan, but were they really that naive?

    i would think that this would have been set up in similar fashion to high speed cable internet access, where publically routed ip's are handed out via dhcp and safeguards are placed to prevent p
  • Now both residents of Grand Haven, Michigan have wireless access!
    • Was that an attempt at humor?

      Grand Haven Population: 11,168 [areaconnect.com]

      • Was that an attempt at humor?

        Grand Haven Population: 11,168

        OK, so it's larger than 2 people. But not much. Sorry if I offended your little village there.
        • Actually, its a really great town that most could learn a lot from. Its small, but it draws visitors from all around. ps. Not a resident. Originally from Muskegon (to the north) and live in Kalamazoo (to the east).
    • I am one of them!

      BTW now that everybody knows about the wifi, I may as well tell you we have great coffee, food, bars, and beaches that used to be filled with really hot chicks... that is before all the geeks moved in!

      So with this I will leave you the wifi, coffee, food, and bars to go follow the hotties in bikini's, anyone want to buy a house?

      Cheers

  • They're also planning city wide WiFi in Wilton Manors, FL (http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/sf l-cwireless01feb01,0,3650838.story). There are already several hot spots in the city, which is only 2.5 mile square.
  • Free wifi is already available. Just connect to your neighbors wifi and surf the Internet over his cable connection. Works great and it is free.

    At least until they catch on and setup encryption, but then that can be broken given a little time.

  • City-wide WiFi is cool, "completely secure" is so unlikely that it's a good joke, and this color scheme sucks.

    Or maybe this color scheme is a /. joke that I don't get.

  • First? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Freak ( 16973 )

    Lots of small cities/town have done this.

    Hermiston, Oregon (popultion about 13,000, a litte larger than Grand Haven,) has had this for over a year. Newsweek even proclaimed that town the most Unwired [msn.com] back in June.

    Oh, I see. Because it's not done by the city of Hermiston, but rather covers the entire 600 square-mile county, it's just the first county, not the first city. After all, Grand Haven only covers *SIX* square miles, not six hundred.

    The second phase is just finishing, which will add another

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • First? Not even close... (Score:3, Informative)

    by kennybain ( 770451 ) on Saturday July 31, 2004 @10:10PM (#9855597) Homepage Journal
    I see the post referencing my deployments in LA & TX - thanks Entity1633. Actually - not to toot my own horn, there are several towns in this region of the US that have city-wide WiFi. In addition to the TWO citywide Fastline http://www.fastlineinternet.com/ [fastlineinternet.com] networks that have been running for over a year now(Vivian, LA & Linden, TX) another group NETWI http://www.netwi.org/ [netwi.org] has deployed city-wide WiFi across Queen City & Atlanta, Texas. NETWI are working on other cities in East Texas. In addition, there are at least three other WISP's in this region actively deploying citywide WiFi. All of us use LocustWorld software & off-the-shelf hardware. Still, I applaud these guys. What they have done is to be commended.
  • I would like to do the same to my small town (1600 pop.); however, I suppose putting up a nice big antenna in the center and saying "Have Fun!" wouldn't qualify, eh?
  • I bet this was already done... in japan.

    Wow this [slashdot.org] does work :).

  • The Real Story (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I live in Grand Haven and work in IT. This service is nice, but not all it is cracked up to be. First, it is relatively slow, second, there are big holes in the coverage, at least for now. I've spent some time snooping around with my Powerbook, and there are many locations inside the city boundaries where there is no signal.

    I use the service because it lets me go down to my favorite coffee shop and use my Powerbook, and because it is a great idea. I hope it gets better (faster, better coverage) as it matur
  • Which nation?

  • RIAA will shut this down (Score:3, Funny)

    by f0rt0r ( 636600 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @03:18AM (#9856650)
    The day after the City-wide Wlan was completed, it was shut down under a court injunction in response to a complaint the RIAA filed stating "Some part of this network may possible one day maybe used to for illegal sharing of copyrighted filed." When asked for proof, an RIAA official was cited as saying "I found a file called Mike_Jackson.doc on a wireless users 'My Shared Documents' folder, and most likely it is a cleverly renamed mp3 file of a Michael Jackson track."

    When we asked a judge why the court responded to the complaint so quickly without due process, all we got was a "no comment" as he climbed into a new Mercedes Benz vehicle with license plate that read "luvriaa".

  • Roaming? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by skaag ( 206358 )
    How do these guys handle roaming? What happens when I move out of one access point and into another? Anyone here has an idea what happens (or lives in Grand Haven and can give us all a report from first hand experience?)

    I want to start an underground movement in my country where people all grant access to their accesspoints to the public, but then without roaming it's kinda silly.

    Thanks! :-)

    Skaag
  • Subject sayes it all really, and then I'll go mumbling as to why people write national stories for international press.
  • penis envy [walkersands.com]?
  • Why do these new technology providers all seem to be able to sell our public servants on the idea that there is no way they can build out a network without public funding, while the incumbent players end up paying taxes and fees to the government? I thought communications laws were being changed to level the playing field.

    In an indirect way, the existing infrastructure players are paying for their competition - cable companies pay franchise fees and phone companies pay universal access fees. What taxes are

  • Plus, they have a damn fine beach. Or it was a fine beach, until everybody started bringing their laptops there...

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