OPB radio ran a story about Portland’s upcoming municipal wi-fi this morning. In the story, a spokeswoman from MetroFi said that users would have to agree to a terms and conditions page and could get to “virtually any website.” What are the terms and conditions? What websites won’t people be able to access? Will VOIP, SSH, and BitTorrent be allowed? What ports are blocked? These are questions that should be answered, especially if MetroFi is receiving money from taxpayers.
I’ll do some digging into this later today.
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Lindsey sent me the link to MetroFi’s Acceptable Use Policy page.
I sent MetroFi an e-mail that essentially asks the same questions this post does.
I got a response from MetroFi. It seems that the spokeswoman misspoke. (Or you could blame me for taking her too literally.) They don’t do any filtering. They only block port 25, and that’s only for the free service. They don’t throttle any services, but are considering doing so for BitTorrent.
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Portland rocks.