Friday, December 09, 2005
"TO CONTINUE INTO THE 21st CENTURY"
Technology - A wonder to behold! The availability of knowledge by all finally drags some kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Their are those that would rather we were still living in the dark ages of three channels on our TV's. Lets expand further on into the future. Wifi in the City (town) Hall,... in the Schools,...in local business,...and yes even in your home! Now in this future world laptops now are the size of a paperback book, can be carried in the back pocket or your purse. Need to look up something in the Town records, no problem, just park in the parking lot and access. No need to walk in the rain or the snow...need a form of some sort? Again no problem just access and download. Need to look up a bylaw?... you got it ...no problem...Oh that would make City (town) hall sooooo user friendly! How about our future students...Oh such a great tool to teaching., The students can study to pass the State Mandated Tests without ever having to attend a formal class. Could graduate in just a couple of months. Think of the savings to the school budget! After all it doesn't seem to matter how much knowledge a student has acquired, but how good they are at passing The State Smart Tests! And we would not need those pesky teachers, that the State has certified but seems to think that they aren't qualified to teach, ( I have problems with that logic? ) Seems it is all their fault that our students are so stupid! Hmmmm.... Maybe less administration and more Education would help?....Nah...I forgot our State Certified Teachers aren't smart enough to do it on their own, they need administering, that's where all the smarts are! Business could take advantage of this too. They wouldn't have all those people sliding in and out of their store all day, never know what they may have swiped? Sit on a BENCH outside their establishment and look and see if they have the item you are looking for. Were talking accessibility here folks. Or you could just access the Chamber of Republicans and they could tell you where you could find the item you are looking for is, that is if the business pays their dues to the Chamber, otherwise good luck! See.... I told you you would like living in the 21st century! What do you think? IT's YOUR DIME!
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14 comments:
So..."X" Guy...with all the hardware already in place...I mean the City (town) Hall already wired for computers on their intranet...couldn't you just add a wireless router and be set up for Wifi from City (town) Hall? I mean it's not like it's a private enterprise or anything... it is a public enety so their arn't any privigliged private issues to consider. I think a wireless router cost about $70 bucks...that seems inexpencive enough.
Not quite that simple Southview. There are routers and then there are routers. The $70 router will only handle so much traffic and will broadcast a short distance. They are designed for the home. You also are discussing two different concepts between your post and your comment. The wifi hot spot is designed for people in close proximity to the router to be able to access the internet.
To allow people from any location, local or not, be able to access city information, that information would have to be stored on a server capable handling a multitude of requests at once. Not rocket science, but not cheap either.
To me, wifi hot spots are not the answer. A wireless WLAN is what should be looked at. This would provide wireless service for downtown NA with traffic being routed through the fiber optic, that is at MoCA, back and forth across the internet. If you are in this wireless network you could request information from any location on the net and the traffic would flow wireless from your device to the access point (MoCA). The access point would then tranfer the request to the fiber optic and out onto the information superhighway. As demand grows the wireless foot print could be expanded.
By serving the downtown area, the police, fire, hospital, and ambulance would have means of communication other than phone or limited distance / frequency dependent radios. Conte School would have access, and with a couple directional antenna, so could Drury and McCann.
Police and fire vehicles could have laptops that connect real-time to their respective databases, weather info, etc. In addition you would provide the "hot spot" affect that you all are interested in.
MoCA and the Mohawk Theater could take advantage of the network to reach a larger audience. Local government officals could attend conferences in Boston with video feeds. VoIP service would be available to anyone with such a device. The tourism industry could use the network for many applications. The possibilites are endless, from govermental business to ordering a pizza.
Are there hurdles to leap, of course. Are there security issues to be dealt with, of course. Are there funding issues to solve, yes. In my mind the questions is not can this be done, but who will control it. Do the people of NA want to be at the mercy of Verizon or Adelphia or Company X? Possibly have length of service contracts, restrictions on bandwidth, have your service depend on the profitability of a company or do they want to take ownership of their own wireless destiny? Its your call.
I also think those who are interested in this proposal should be looking into the newer WiMax where there maybe research dollars available since it is such a new technology. But remember I am only a snot-nosed aristocrat, what the hell do I know.
what we need first and formost is a city web site...fyi..there is only one fax machine in city hall...networking, isn't that what is done when you meet people who could be beneficial to your career?....let's get into the 21st century and make our city more accessible via paperless communication...tax rate lowered on residential property owners, assesment goes up for a net increase...assesment stagnent for commercial property tax rate goes up for a net increase, yet we are told that there are no cuts in services only budget cuts....isn't that a cut in services? our fire dept is paying out the wazoo in ot because we don't have enough fire fighters to man all shifts...we'll fix that...cut their budget!smoke and mirrors....cjtrem
Mayor 8 CJT 1
chbpod
Wow...da snoop...That system sounds complicated, and expensive. I guess I wasn't thinking big enough. But you are right, if something is worth doing it is worth doing right. Don't we have someone at city hall that does this sort of grant reserch? Checking if their are monies for city projects like this?
There was a lot of work done already. If you follow the link that I posted yesterday you see the path that was followed at one time, also plenty of names to contact. As for some one at city hall?? I have no idea, that might be one for POD, but given his distaste for the idea, you might want to try someone else. Perhaps Mr. Etman would know. Maybe Wes has looked into it.
Here is another take on what I think is possible in NA. The article is an older one, very relevant to what is happening, or could be happening in NA.
http://www.tfi.com/pubs/ntq/articles/view/95Q2_A1.html
Watched a great show on T3 Teleport Town in Japan last night. A city of 16 million built on re-claimed land and around the premise that high speed wireless transmission would be the corner stone of any new community.
da snoop said:
"There are routers and then there are routers. The $70 router will only handle so much traffic and will broadcast a short distance. They are designed for the home."
Exactly! And that is just scartching the surface when it comes to a network of this magnitude. I'm glad to see snoop does have a litte grasp on reality about all of this. Now...let's think network SECURITY. That alone would require more equipment, more man hours and more bandwidth. (You wouldn't want to leave all of city halls records wide open to the entire "world wide web-averse" would you? Not to mention, the more people become dependent on such a network, espicially emergency services such as fire and police, the more redundancy you are going to need to build into it. And you'll need a 24x7x365 NOC (Network Operations Center) monitoring it, as well as 24x7x365 staffed technician(s) to go out and fix it. Else, you just opened yourselves up to some major law suits. (Call 1-800-LAWYER!) Oh yeah. You'd better have spare parts on hand to FIX it as well, so plan on buying at least two of EVERYTHING.
(Getting the idea yet?)
Anyone that has not lived a network engineer's life for a medium to large size network has NO idea what all goes on behind the scenes......
"Conte School would have access, and with a couple directional antenna, so could Drury and McCann"
I know you are a broad band guy and obviously a HUGE fan of wireless Snoop, but with the network scenario you propose above, it would be much more cost effective and secure to bring Drury and McCann on line via fiber. For the cost of a fiber link from each school back to MoCA, you'd have almost unlimited bandwidth as well as a link that is not vunerable to the elements or hackers. You could still have a wireless link as a backup between the sites if so desired, and also place a wireless access point at each location to pick up wifi from the business and residential locations nearby and VLAN the traffic back over the fiber keeping all the traffic segragated,
Again, just my 2 cents.
And if you are looking for numbers, I had my hand in setting up a Cisco ONS15454 DWDM fiber ring that can supply thirty-two 10Gig channels (yes....32 X 10 = 320 Gigabit) over a single piar of fibers. Works GREAT!!
-x
http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/netsol/ns283/c643/ccmigration_09186a00802236e3.pdf
"X"...so chbpods figure of $150,000 per sq. mile would be a fair estimate? Sounds cheep enough to me! :~) But remember we now can layoff everyone working at City (town) Hall, a sabstantial savings right there. All we would need is person there to monitor the system and do data entry, well maybe an assistent to help with filling the fax machine with paper and the such. Actually we can do away with City (town) Hall as such and move everything into a Buttler building in the K-Mart parking lot. We then could rent out the vacated office space..generating more income for the city coffers. The mayor could work from his car or at home, so no need for an office...I'm beginning to like this modern Wifi concept more and more! With this plan we would actually make money!
"X" you have some interesting points and yes I am a huge fan of wireless, but please do not water down the initial idea with the idea of a city wide network. I personally don't think that is the correct starting point. So let me clearify a few items.
1)My part of the idea came about because several people wanted hot spots in the downtown area, which I think are a good idea, but instead of several limited hot spots, I propose a larger single wireless footprint for the downtown area and threw a couple benefits out there for such a network.
2)I disagree that running fiber out to Drury and McCann would be cheaper or any more secure than shooting a signal from the downtown access point.
3)The access point you propose at the two high schools fall under my idea of expanding the wireless footprint as demand grows.
4)I have tried to point out that the idea of a city network is not the same thing a wireless hot spot for the downtown area and did mention what would be involved in creating and maintaining such a city network.
5)To try and hammer out a proposal on a blog is an exercise in futility. If you are interested in being a part of the solution, and not a nay-sayer, then I would suggest you contact Wes from his blog "Walk in Brain" at http://straightmute.blogspot.com/. I don't think I should speak for Wes, it was his idea originally and I'm just trying to support it. Your technical background would be quite beneficial if you wish to help.
You certainly back up our contention that this can be done and that there are people in the area who can get it done. It is just a matter of how grand an idea one wishes to pursue.
Agreed Snoop. The idea of starting small and slowly growing the network would indeed be the best approach in my opinon. And much of this was probably discussed long before I steped in here so perhaps I am sticking my nose in where it does not belong. It's just at the point where I picked this up, it sounded like folks were planning on building this city wide wireless network overnight and for free and expecting it to handle any an all traffic today, tomorrow and forever. I'm not in any way trying to be a "nay-sayer". Just mearly trying to be sure folks are not getting too far away from reality with said idea. As for helping out, I just recently (2 months ago) moved out of the area, but I would be more then happy to provide my advice (or opinion as you have seen.) ;) if anybody cares to hear when and if such a network becomes reality. Southview knows how to get ahold of me. I will step back now and refrain from discussing this topic further. As you aptly stated, "To try and hammer out a proposal on a blog is an exercise in futility."
Best wishes and Happy Holidays to everyone!!
-X
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