Will San Francisco get public WiFi after all?
Om Malik blogs:
Despite the best efforts of Earthlink (ENLK), Google (GOOG) and Mayor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco MuniFi project is still stuck in neutral and going nowhere fast. For San Francisco residents, a new option has emerged: Sonic.net, a Santa Rosa, CA-based independent ISP that is using gear from Meraki Networks, a wireless hardware company based in Mountain View, Calif., and is trying to promote an ad-supported MuniFi model. (Its actually more like community wifi, and you can call it ComMuniFi.)Link
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I love sonic.net. they are a great independent DSL provider. i've been a customer for over a year. all of their connection packages include a unix shell account, vpn termination, a firewall, mailing lists along with all the other industry standard features.
meraki makes a lot of sense. theres 30 routers everywhere. convincing say 5 of them to be part of the community net and giving them a tax kickback is a lot simpler than engineering some new solution (which is going to be worse anyways with less coverage and APs outside of buildings instead of inside..
I've been a customer of Sonic.net for six years, and they are hands-down the BEST ISP I've ever had. I lived in SF for years and went through TLG, Earthlink, and a bunch of others. Sonic runs their systems flawlessly, cheaply, and with great (LIVE) tech support. Too bad they're based in Santa Rosa, which sucks, but that hasn't affected the quality of their service. Go guys!
Sonic is quite possibly the greatest ISP in the history of the world ;^) I chose them after the nightmare of using SBC DSL in the late 90s owing to unanimously favorable word of mouth in Santa Rosa, where I live. Tech support is awesome, no matter how technical the question, and I couldn't begin to tell you the last time my connection went down -- not this year, nor last, nor possibly even 2005. I just moved and despite quoting 5-7 days to have DSL set up and running on a new phone number that I ordered the day before from AT&T, the whole thing was done in 2 business days. If Dane and his crew are in a market, they will do it right or not at all. I'm betting they can succeed where GOOG hasn't.
yeah, sonic is a great isp, but the job they're doing in downtown santa rosa for their public wifi is pretty crappy.
for an extended period of time [months on end] the transmitters they were using were left in their rebooted state, broadcasting a signal, but no network, identified by the manufacturer, not the network name.
when you sit in courthouse square of santa rosa, within coverage of several transmitters, it's easy to watch the signals come up and drop over and over, randomly.
now, it's easier to leech off local businesses and their low output signals than it is to try to connect to the signal from sonic and santa rosa "econnect"
you'd think that they'd have an interest in the quality of service they're providing, considering the advertising they're getting from the city for it.
i think they'd find their tech support email boxes stuffed if they brought this product to sf with the same lack of support that they're showing in santa rosa, their backyard.
Now that is a line!
Did you see Gavin Newsom's new campaign slogan?