From BetaNews:
In the latest of a lengthening string of failures in city-wide wireless projects across the US, MetroFi of Mountain View, CA has reportedly stopped work on a project in Portland, Oregon.
After installing 590 functional wireless access points (APs) in Portland, MetroFi has asked the city to provide $9 million in public funds to finish the job with an additional 2,000-or-so APs.
I’m glad that the city has decided not to spend public money on this disappointing project. Maybe I’m an exception, but I never found a “functional” MetroFi access point. I’ve always been able to see them in my list of available networks. But connecting to them has always failed.
(This is a reply to a post on Frustrated Geek.)
I agree that Twitter doesn’t make much sense on a large scale. However, it makes a ton of sense locally. If I’m somewhere in Portland and would like to meet up with someone for dinner or drinks, it allows me to broadcast that information to everyone who is listening. It’s also a lot less intrusive than calling people up to ask if they will meet you.
Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t really seem to be playing up the local angle. Dodgeball does, but I really don’t know anyone who uses it.
As you may have noticed, I didn’t get the post about my new phone finished over the weekend. I wasn’t really in the writing mood. I also need to do a little more research. Tomorrow evening, maybe.
It looks like this weekend is going to be all about the mobile web. I just set up a Twitter account (feed here). I’m not sure I understand how it will be useful yet. But I said the same thing about del.icio.us before I started using it, so I’m going to give this a try.
Unfortunately, I only know two people who use Twitter. If you are using it please tell me.
This is a test post from my new phone. I’ll be writing more about it later this weekend.
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.
Portland has made a deal for construction of a citywide wi-fi network. It doesn’t look like they’re saying when they plan on rolling it out yet.
Engadget has the answer (via Gabe):
In a GSM system in particular, the pre-ring chirps you see are the phone negotiating with the serving tower for a traffic [voice] channel on a particular frequency band and timeslice (versus the pre-allocated and shared control channel) to carry your conversation.
