Boris on Wifi
via The BBC:
Mayor Boris Johnson has said he wanted London to become “a wi-fi city”, where the internet was available anywhere.
Oh dear. Let’s outline the options that are currently already available for connecting to the internet in central London:-
- Wi-fi in cafes/restaurants. For the price of a latte or a Big Mac, you can sit down and use someone’s wi-fi at some locations, or about £7/month to get all of The Cloud’s hotspots (it’s cheaper if you own an iPod Touch, I think).
- Wi-fi in hotels. Somewhat more expensive, but if you can afford a room in London, you probably won’t notice the price.
- Connect your cellphone to your computer and use it as a modem.
- Buy a 3G USB dongle for your laptop for £50 and pay from £2 a day to get on the internet.
- Find an internet cafe.
All of these options have, over the past few years, become cheaper, and are still getting cheaper. Wifi used to be an expensive add-on with your coffee, but is more frequently becoming a marketing point, a way to get people to come and buy coffee/biscotti from you.
He said this was better than a £300m plan announced by Gordon Brown, where vouchers for computers will be given to schoolchildren to get them online.
It isn’t. Before people can even get on a wifi network, they have to have a computer. So, a scheme to provide wi-fi is absolutely not the first stage of making sure that people have access to the internet. Additionally, there are a number of free wired broadband services (Sky, TalkTalk, Orange), so in terms of access to the internet, you don’t need wi-fi once you’ve got the computer.
I don’t know the details of Brown’s scheme, but if you want to provide something to people because they’re too poor, vouchers at least give you the benefit of keeping competition intact. So, if someone is given a voucher (and it’s done properly), it still means that Dell, Tesco, HP and Acer have to compete for it. A government provided wi-fi network will destroy most of the competition and provide the service at a higher cost than the market.
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Agreed.
And even better than earmarked vouchers are straight cash handouts - otherwise The Goblin King’s plan discriminates against people who already own computers, and BoJo’s plan discriminates against people with dongles, or indeed Internet cafes who will lose a lot of business. And even better than cash handouts are tax cuts. And even more important than tax cuts are government spending cuts, which sort of gets us back to square one, only the opposite conclusion.
If city-wide wif-fi is a good idea (and there are no doubt economies of scale to this) then it should be costed out and funded via land value tax (it may well be a good investment, I do not profess to know).
Hi Mark,
Agree re: tax cuts. I wasn’t exactly supporting Brown’s plan (although spending poor people’s taxes on computers for them is far better than spending it on opera houses).
I’m not convinced of the merits of an “all taxpayers pay for it” city-wide wi-fi. It’s not an essential service like lighting or the ambulance, nor is it something with a high barrier to entry.
A very small percentage of the population actually needs wi-fi, basically “knowledge workers” who are located away from their normal internet connection.
The other thing is that many of those workers will still need a 3G dongle because when they come out of London, they won’t have coverage.
Paris’ Mayor Bertrund Delanoe (out Gay) has already put wifi in every park here in Paris. The real benefit is that one can go out to the parc on a lovely day to work on computer instead of sitting inside. One has to find a shady place to see the screen.
I just wish Boris would model himself on this Mayor. London could do with copying exactly (no half measures) The fab Paris Plages - there are three now - which last a month and is so well organised, giving something of quality (nightly guingettes for example - that’s open air dance halls) which the otherwise lonely elderly especially enjoy . And the Velib which is also done properly and extremely well used. Also, he puts on a month of entirely free open air cinemas - at a different location around the city every night - just amazing!
Come to think of it, why aren’t LOndon and Paris doing ‘twinning’ , now that the link is door to door (as in my case) and so fast.
ivegotanasbo,
Someone has to pay for “free” wifi and “free” cinema. If the mayor isn’t sticking his hand in his pockets, it’s the tax payers of Paris.
I think Boris is already closer than you think. He’s shown himself to be quite the little statist already.
And what about the schlong or whatever they call it which you have to stick in your usb port - are these to be free? Good, I want one for my Mac right now.
Hi James,
I thought Macs came with wifi?
“I’m not convinced of the merits of an “all taxpayers pay for it” city-wide wi-fi. It’s not an essential service like lighting or the ambulance, nor is it something with a high barrier to entry.”
There are clearly costs and benefits. The value of the benefit is difficult to judge (every person has his own opinion) the costs can be estimated more accurately (assuming security etc issues can be overcome). And I am assuming that there are economies of scale.
i.e. the closest thing to a free market solution is for local residents to be told how much it costs, e.g. per property. If the costs works out at £5 per annum per property, a majority might be happy to pay it, so it goes ahead.
But perhaps the cost per property is £100 per annum, only a minority are in favour (and most of those already have dongle etc), in which case it doesn’t go ahead.
This is exactly the sort of thing, assuming that people vote in favour, that should be funded via what is effectively local Land Value Tax - it may well be that the VALUE of the wi-fi is considerably in excess of the cost, or the cost/value of the alternatives (dongles etc). Or not, as the case may be.
Hi Mark,
The thing with wi-fi is that it’s also the sort of thing that can be done at almost any scale. So, if a neighbourhood thinks that it would be worthwhile, then they could club together to do it. There are companies doing wi-fi setups to rural areas that haven’t had their exchanges upgraded for DSL where they get a dedicated line fitted and attached to some wireless kit.
One thing that is quite interesting is this map of London: http://londonist.com/2007/05/free_wifi_in_lo.php. It basically shows that there are already hundreds of places in the main areas of demand in London doing free wi-fi.