Beating the city to the punch, on Wednesday night senior members of Portland’s Personal Telco Project presented preliminary findings of their evaluation of the City of Portland’s fledgling wireless network.
Their conclusion: it isn’t working as promised.
When the city was soliciting bids for the network’s construction, it sought 90 percent coverage within 500 feet of a wi-fi point. But Personal Telco members found the network being established by Metro-Fi supplied just over 50 percent coverage.
“The probability that they’re meeting the 90 percent threshold is one in a billion,” said Russell Senior, who along with Caleb Phillips, performed the evaluation.
Personal Telco Project is a nonprofit committed to building a community-supported wireless network. Though the findings were presented at the group’s monthly meeting, Personal Telco didn’t sponsor the evaluation by Senior and Phillips.
The city recently hired Uptown Services, of Boulder, Colo., to evaluate the wi-fi network. That report is expected sometime in April.
Logan Kleier, Portland’s official wi-fi guy, has not seen the report presented Wednesday night. But he did state that if the network doesn’t reach specified goals, it would have to be remedied.
“This is the grade you have to get,” he said. “If you have to study 100 hours, or hire a tutor, then do it.”
Metro-Fi began establishing the network in December of last year and is responsible for its complete roll-out. The network is an ad-supported, free-of-charge system and is not subsidized by tax or levy.
Senior emphasized that all trials were performed outside, thus sidestepping the well-inked issue of the indoor connectivity problem.
Using mainly random selection, the men used 39 points scattered throughout the network’s coverage area, an area Senior estimates to contain over 1,000 acres. All of these points were within 500 feet of an access point, or node.
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Keep getting cards on my door bragging about the great new free WiFi… whose signal is no where to be found anywhere nearby…certainly not at my house.
They used the wrong system, although the signals from their antennas will reach the users laptop antenna, the transmitter inside the typical laptop is way too weak to get the signal back to the antenna
They should have used the Meraki Mesh network instead, its much cheaper and reliable
I gave a presentation of how a inexpensive system would work for Hillsboro to the Mayor for approx $100-$200/block, and he had no interest whatsoever
Doesn’t it make sense, that Hillsboro being the High-tech center of Oregon should have city-wide Wifi ?
Look what happened in SF, when the people got tired of the same responses of our government telling them "soon" and "we are researching a solution" for years after years – they just implemented a system on their own:
http://sf.meraki.com/