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Government Communications Network The Internet Wireless Networking

Free Wi-Fi Program in Los Angeles Fails to Provide Free Wi-Fi (latimes.com) 94

Posted by EditorDavid from the not-so-hot-spot dept.
The Los Angeles Time found no internet connectivity in 24 public locations, despite a three-year, $500,000 grant to provide them with free Wi-Fi service. Investigations both last year and again in March found that none of the 18+ locations checked were able to successfully connect to the internet, prompting a PUC investigation that confirmed only two of the hotspots were working. The grant was part of a $315 million state-wide program using surcharges on utility bills to promote high-quality communication services, though in Los Angeles most of the money for "underserved" areas was being directed to outreach and education. The Wi-Fi company's executive director said maintaining their networks had proved to be difficult, though one economist argued it would've been more productive to give net-access subsidies directly to the poor, a program the FCC recently voted to expand.
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Free Wi-Fi Program in Los Angeles Fails to Provide Free Wi-Fi More

Free Wi-Fi Program in Los Angeles Fails to Provide Free Wi-Fi

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  • "free" never fails to disapoint (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrLogic17 ( 233498 ) on Saturday April 02, 2016 @05:06PM (#51829637) Journal

    This is commonly the result of the government promising something free.
    The taxes get collected, no doubt, but the promised freebie never quite pans out.

    Keep that in mind when voting.

    • Re:"free" never fails to disapoint (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Saturday April 02, 2016 @05:48PM (#51829803) Homepage

      Odd, you point out the government side of the problem.. but not the corporate side that takes the money, pockets it and ignores the reason they were given the money in the first place.

      So keep in mind when voting, we need more regulation and oversight of corporations that take government money folks.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jayson ( 2343 )

        His point is that the government will never had enough of oversight of itself -- it shouldn't have had this bad of a failure for so long -- to fix these problems. Saying it would all be better if the government just did something it historically never been able to do well is a fool's dream. Lacking a profit motive, governments have very little natural force correcting them, especially when it comes to bureaucrats paid according to union standards and protected by them. They really don't care if anything wor

        • Re:"free" never fails to disapoint (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Saturday April 02, 2016 @08:27PM (#51830429) Homepage

          Capitalism self corrects around it and uses our worst side -- the greed -- to make the world better.

          No, it does not make the world better. It just has really impressive marketing to make you think it does.

          'The Market' does not choose the best choice, just the most profitable one. Its only metric of 'good' is profit, and nothing else matters.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mi ( 197448 )

        but not the corporate side that takes the money, pockets it and ignores the reason they were given the money in the first place.

        Whether it is "corporate" is irrelevant here — the defining characteristics is that the service was paid for by the government. The official approving the check did not spend his own funds.

        So keep in mind when voting, we need more regulation and oversight of corporations that take government money folks.

        The regulations are already insanely complicated — I just had to st

        • Re:"free" never fails to disapoint (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Saturday April 02, 2016 @08:07PM (#51830361) Homepage

          You people, you do everything you can to deflect from the corporate greed that creates these situations.

          Why did this service need to be provided by the government? Because corporations don't want to serve the public good, they only want to make as much profit as possible. They kill competition, don't deliver half what their marketing material promises, outright lie, dodge their customers and do whatever they can to force their beleaguered customers into arbitration or other avenues to limit their accountability when they're inevitably held accountable.

          The reason those regulations are so insanely complicated? Decades of corporate sharks chipping away at the laws to create new and ever more inventive ways to steal from the public.

          The solution is to force corporations to adhere to some damn ethics. Hold CEO's responsible and if corporations are people? Then how about we 'execute' a couple, just to remind the rest that they're not above the law.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by mi ( 197448 )

            Why did this service need to be provided by the government?

            Because there was no sufficient demand for it in the first place. Economics 101.

            Because corporations don't want to serve the public good, they only want to make as much profit as possible

            Of course, they want to make profit, what's wrong with that?

            They kill competition

            The government does that — when it picks the "winner" based on the sympathies and biases of the bureaucrat(s), who do not spend his own money and is not even planning to use the p

            • Re:"free" never fails to disapoint (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Sunday April 03, 2016 @12:20AM (#51831137) Homepage

              Because there was no sufficient demand for it in the first place. Economics 101.

              Yes, all the places that had to start their own municipal ISP's after begging their incumbent providers to sell them service repeatedly fell on deaf ears was not "sufficient demand". "Sufficient demand" is code for "profitable demand". For some services, like medicines or utilities, the needs of the people to access those products trumps the need for quick and easy profits.

              Of course, they want to make profit, what's wrong with that?

              Nice deflection there. First you say corporations "make the world better" and rather than defend that statement which is so obviously wrong a 4 year old can poke holes in it, you ask why is making a profit wrong. In and of itself, profit isn't wrong, as long as the methods and means to create that profit do no public harm.

              The government does that — when it picks the "winner" based on the sympathies and biases of the bureaucrat(s), who do not spend his own money and is not even planning to use the purchased service himself (and sometimes even take bribes). This — government picking the winner — is what kills the competition and allows the thus-picked winners to do all those nasty things [wired.com] you claim to be unhappy about.

              You simply can't admit your own delusion. You fault government officials for taking bribes to rig the market BUT WON'T FAULT BUSINESSES FOR PAYING THE BRIBES!!! Where do you think the money comes from? Some secret government bureau that bribes itself??? If businesses weren't fronting the money, there wouldn't be corrupt government officials! The two things are not separate from each other.

              Plus the government creating standards and the occasional monopoly can also CREATE a market. The only reason we have coast to coast telephone service today is because the government subsidized it, gave Bell a monopoly on it to pay for it all, and provided right-of-way for the lines. If they hadn't "picked the winner", we'd have the phone system of your average 3rd world country and Verizon's equipment wouldn't talk to AT&T's.

              Damn you Libertardian's are thick sometimes. Government does more to help business than hinder it, especially when it comes to holding back the unrestrained greed and forcing standards which enable equal competition.

              There is no law in the US, that provides for capital punishment over ethics violations. You would have to become above the law yourself to start killing people over it...

              I was talking about "killing" corporations, which are only "people" in legalistic terms. Because a corporate death penalty for egregious corporate behavior would be a good thing.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by fche ( 36607 )

                "Sufficient demand" is code for "profitable demand".

                Of course it does. Demand is apprx. infinite for products and services at a price below their cost.

        • "Whether it is "corporate" is irrelevant here â" the defining characteristics is that the service was paid for by the government. The official approving the check did not spend his own funds."

          That means that nothing but, maybe, little pop & mom business can work as basically no one in a bigger company (and nobody at all on a publicly traded one) is spending their own funds either.

          And then, given that neither corps nor government can work, I still prefer government to be the one managing funds for a

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by mi ( 197448 )

            no one in a bigger company (and nobody at all on a publicly traded one) is spending their own funds either.

            Though you are right about some level of inefficiency creeping in due simply to the size of the enterprise, there is still a big disadvantage to government-run ones. Private corporations have a "chain of command" with owners/share-holders at the top. They wield control in proportion to their stake and are empowered [huffingtonpost.com] to hold people responsible.

            Government officials reports to the head of the Executive (Ma

            • While all my previous post was basically tongue-in-cheek (well, at least in this context), this I have problems to support:

              "Corporate greed is normally best satisfied by delivering the goods and services consumers want"

              This may have been true in the past and it is probably still true at the level of short corporations but it is true no more when talking about big corps. "delivering the goods and services consumers want" is just *one* of the tools they have to satisfy their greed and it seems to me that whe

            • I thought it better and I think to be able to answer about the more serious part of my previous message.

              But first, at your request:

              "If you choose to reply, please, be sure to state unambiguously, whether you agree, that
              taxation is confiscation;
              such confiscations by the government against the will of the governed should therefor be minimized."

              I have no problem to accept that "taxation is confiscation" once you got confiscation's definition to include

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
        Like Verizon here: https://www.techdirt.com/blog/... [techdirt.com]

    • This is commonly the result of the government promising something free.
      The taxes get collected, no doubt, but the promised freebie never quite pans out.

      Keep that in mind when voting.

      Nothing from governments work unless the work is audited, and there are scheduled payments based on signed off delivery demonstrations.

      And when the contract is for profit, where the profit is in the installation, but not in the maintenance, you are in the situation indicated above.

  • Well no kidding (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Wireless at this scale has failed everywhere it has been tried, yet these project continue to receive stupid amounts of funding. Wireless works well at small scales but it just doesn't scale well beyond that. Add in a bunch of semi-qualified cronies sucking off the tit (ahem - operating these things) and there is no hope for success.

    Any money that isn't going directly into fiber deployments is money wasted.

    • Re:Well no kidding (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Saturday April 02, 2016 @05:51PM (#51829815) Homepage
      Funny, NY's free gigabit WiFi is working just fine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jayson ( 2343 )

        I was about to mention NYC. I wouldn't say it works fine, but it does work better than most places. The subway stations also have a fairly restricted number of people at a time though, and that is where it works best for me. Also, not everybody business and local is trying to down on it 24/7. I wonder what the peak usage is? I guarantee it is much lower than other places.

      • NY's free gigabit WiFi

        Woah, hang on. GIGAbit WiFi? I've not been giving a fuck about WiFi standards for over a decade (since I wired the last house, just before gigabyte ethernet came out), but I hadn't heard of gigabyte WiFi ... Oh, I see. the old bit/byte bait'n'switch. So, gigaBIT wiFi translates to 125 megaBYTE ... which is 2-4 times faster than the last time I looked, and that sounds about right.

        I'd take it that that's 125Mbyte per access point. So if you've got 100 users (phones, tablets, station inf

    • That's teat, not tit.

  • Step 1: Walk into closest building

    Step 2: Tell them you will pay them $5K/year for adding a public hotspot

    Step 3: Profit!

  • The real problem: Internet in US is expensive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fraxinus-tree ( 717851 ) on Saturday April 02, 2016 @05:51PM (#51829817)
    Here in Eastern Europe, telecoms simply failed to recognize the potential of the Internet and did almost nothing to secure a monopoly. So EVEN THE POOREST people have Internet access. $10/month is pretty usual broadband deal in Bulgaria and you can find one as low as $5/month if you look harder. Minimal salary here is ~$240/month (for comparison).

  • Ongoing funding is needed (Score:5, Informative)

    by imidan ( 559239 ) on Saturday April 02, 2016 @07:00PM (#51830061)

    I scratch my head when I see a program like this. The business got a half million dollar grant from the public utilities commission to set up free wifi for underserved areas. But they were missing any kind of authority or leverage to install the equipment, even on city property, and wound up finding local businesses who would agree to let them set up the equipment in their buildings.

    What they apparently didn't have was any plan for maintaining the equipment and service once they installed the hardware. TFA says equipment was stolen, or disconnected, or shut down, and the business didn't even know that was the case. Seems to me that if you wanted to build such a system, one of the most basic elements would be a monitoring component that gave you some idea of the state of the equipment you'd installed.

    Of course, monitoring and maintenance require ongoing commitment of funds, which are almost never part of these types of grants. The idea, apparently, is that you're going to use the initial grant as start-up money, and before it runs out, you'll find some other source of money. But the approach that these guys took seems so wrong-headed that I don't see why anyone would give them more money.

    • What they apparently didn't have was any plan for maintaining the equipment and service once they installed the hardware.

      It doesnt sound to me like they were actually able to install the hardware that they planned to install, let alone put it where they wanted to install it.

      You can't put anything on the corporation when the government doesn't allow it to do any of the things the government hired it to do.

      Sure, maybe this is someones cousin.. maybe it always was a crony deal (probably true more often than not in california.) The government is still ultimately responsible. The government planned to and then taxed the peopl

  • Government is, with the exception of the military, the worst possible place you can put money to help others.

    I add in the military as an exception only because they do things on a scale and with abilities that are simply beyond private companies - no private company can deploy something like an aircraft carrier so close to disaster zones for example.

    But for every other government agency, you will absolutely get 10x the amount of wastefulness, incompetency, and just sheer graft that you'll find with a govern

    • There's a reason when a disaster occurs that calls come into to donate to the Red Cross, not send more money to FEMA...

      Because they're stupid? Something like 30% or more of the money you donate to the Red Cross goes to fundraisers and management [propublica.org], not people in need.

      Most charities are scams and spend the majority of the dollars they rake in from sympathetic chumps on their own executives or to professional fund raising firms.

  • Surely the government-funded free stuff works as designed?

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