Muni Fiber and Politics

Mon Jul 21 20:47:25 UTC 2014

On Jul 21, 2014, at 4:26 PM, Aaron <aaron at wholesaleinternet.net> wrote:

> Do you have an example of a municipality that gives free internet access to it's residents?

Cleveland, OH Ward 13.
http://oldbrooklynconnected.com

Nearly every street in the ward has multiple wireless access points serving Internet access to the residents at 2.4 GHz.  5 GHz is used for backhaul.  Ubiquity networks wireless gear is used with a smattering of Mikrotik routers throughout.
It’s not terribly reliable but then maybe that’s on purpose to discourage lawsuits.  If there is a problem with the system on a Friday at 5:30 PM, it’ll be down until the following Tuesday.  The bandwidth also isn’t anything to write home about, but for free (meaning I don’t directly send these folks a check every month) it’s not too bad.  I can get 6 Mbps down and 2-4 Mbps up, sometimes more up and down but that’s fairly rare..  I’ve used it for Netflix and it worked reasonably well.  HD content would stream but often would jump back to SD.  Rarely would it stop entirely.
I ended up having to setup an account with Time Warner for their Internet service because I work from home and the wireless interruptions were enough that it was causing problems.  AT&T also serves the area but only with 1.5 Mbps DSL.  No other wired carriers serve the area aside from dialup.

Ryan Wilkins