Dwight reports that the city has narrowed its search down to two vendors to provide its wireless Internet service. They expect to pick the winner by the end of the year. Dwight also says that there are more access points visible around downtown.
The RFP itself is here (PDF), with Dwight's comments here. I was thinking about this, and took a few minutes to review the RFP after reading this MIT Technology Review article about the San Francisco/Google/Earthlink WiFi experience. To put it mildly, the author is not impressed at how the Golden Gate City is managing this process.
San Francisco's specs for the network were forbidding. The city's request for proposals insisted that the network function seamlessly for users traveling at 30 miles per hour, a trick Wi-Fi engineers haven't quite perfected. The city also called for 95 percent outdoor and 90 percent indoor coverage citywide, which would require an unusually large number of Wi-Fi access points in any city, let alone one as hilly as San Francisco.In their proposal, Google and EarthLink strove to meet these expectations. Google would foot the bill for free Wi-Fi service, which would run--or crawl--at 300 kilobits per second, about five times the speed of a dial-up modem connection. EarthLink would build the network hardware and offer, for $20 a month, a megabit-per-second service with customer support. The proposed network would require at least seven Wi-Fi access points per square kilometer, mounted on city property such as light poles and traffic lights. At this density, the network would meet the city's coverage goal but would not be guaranteed to reach above the second floor of buildings. In April, San Francisco provisionally accepted the Google-EarthLink proposal, pending successful contract negotiations.
In May, however, when I sat through a LAFCO meeting (California's Local Agency Formation Commissions handle county contractual service agreements like the proposed Google-EarthLink Wi-Fi deal) at San Francisco City Hall, I got the impression that city managers remain either deliberately indifferent to or clueless about fundamental aspects of the Google-EarthLink proposal. Of the three commission members present, one remained silent throughout. A second--Tom Ammiano, a former stand-up comic who once ran for mayor--admitted that he was still using dial-up. Otherwise, the meeting was uninterruptedly run by Chairperson Ross Mirkarimi.
Mirkarimi, a Green Party member sporting a modish soul patch and representing District 5, which includes Haight-Ashbury, at least posed some of the right questions. Would users of the ad-supported Wi-Fi simply go through a Google portal page, he asked, or would they also have to suffer through pop-ups? And since Google said that its technology could "target advertisements to specific geographical locations and to user interests," what would prevent users' locations from being tracked? To such questions, the response from the bureaucrats at the city's Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS), and from the private consultants they'd hired, was essentially, "Wise up and quit griping--the city is getting a great deal for free."
The DTIS officials were equally unforthcoming when asked whether it made much sense for San Francisco to effectively grant Google and EarthLink a monopoly on wireless Internet service for the proposed 10-year term of the contract, given how rapidly information technology advances. As Ralf Muehlen, director of the nonprofit Wi-Fi network SFLan, pointed out, "In 2021, 300 kilobits per second is going to seem a bit ridiculous. [...] it's a great solution for, like, 1996."