Somerville may install free wireless in Davis

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From the Somerville Journal:

[John] Connolly also wants wireless Internet service for all of Davis Square.
The Ward 6 alderman is asking City Information Technology Director James Halloran to see if wireless Internet service can be provided to all of Davis Square by installing "a few well-situated" antennae.
"Perhaps it's something we can achieve by this fall," Connolly said.
Coffee shops, including Starbucks and the Diesel Café, already offer wireless Internet service inside their businesses for a nominal charge.
Connolly said he'd like Halloran to meet with the Chamber of Commerce and the Davis Square Business Interest Group to see if the service could be extended to laptop computer users sitting in parks and benches in the square.
If the service works in Davis Square, Connolly said maybe it could be brought to other squares in the city, too.

Comments

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It can be unfair, and maybe even incredibly so. The same could be said of having government-managed trash pickup, and many other city services. Sometimes it's more reasonable for the city to do it, sometimes it's better for it to be in the hands of individual service providers.

These businesses aren't in the business of providing wireless service, and they probably don't want to be. They're using the wireless service -- which is typically provided by a third party, with that associated cost -- as an incentive people use to choose which case to spend time at. Very few customers are going to a cafe because it has wireless service, but many might choose which cafe to go to based, in part, on quality of the wireless service available.

That difference alone might counteract the addition of city sponsored wireless service. If the city does add service, it'll be unlikely that it is of uniformly high quality across all of the square. It may well be usable in many (and even most) locations, but the technical and monetary limitations make it fairly unlikely that you'd get good, reliable service in, for example, the very back of the newly expanded Diesel. This means that shops will still be able to add value with wireless service if they so choose; the situation will change from one where you pay for service to one where you pay for premium service.

One other thing to take into consideration is that it's fairly likely the city would go with the same wireless provider Someday Cafe and The Diesel are already using. These monetary profits these cafes gain on wireless service can't possibly be very appealing, because their prices are essentially fixed in both value and with each other. At the same time, they both incur the same fixed cost to provide the service. It's likely they'd both benefit by reducing the overhead of providing the service, and the real service provider would gain from having a larger contract. At the same time, the economy of scale would likely reduce the cost to individual consumers of the service.

It's entirely possible that this is a a good idea for all involved, but neither you or I have the data, I suspect, to tell for sure.

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