Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Anyone want free Wifi for Green Lanes, Harringay?
Among the many 'divides' that oppress us, the so-called 'digital divide' may not seem close to the top of the list of punishing inequalities we are heir to, but some see it as a key leveller.
Arquiva (a telecomms services company owned by foreign pension funds) has signed up a reported 17 London councils (including Camden, Wandsworth, Hounslow, Islington and Hammersmith & Fulham) to provide passers by with 30 minutes free wifi - Haringey isn't one of them. By the end of next year, for instance, Camden say they'll have rolled it out to:
Camden Town and Kentish Town, Kilburn, Finchley, Hampstead and Belsize Park
It may have been a key selling point that the 'home page' they want you to visit first is the Council's website. They'll do their best to censor selected sites they dislike.
It could be that our lack of public wifi will help us be sen by the rest of London as 'poor'. I wonder why, as a large buyer of broadband and wifi, our Council doesn't offer it to residents in their homes, let alone in the streets? They used to provide 'utilities' like electricity and telephones - who would you rather get poor service from? A large corporate owned by the 1% that pays little tax or a local council with £2bn annual turnover who collects it from you? It's a modern industry that could provide local jobs. Governments regularly step in where there is a will - our railways and the nuclear industry can't survive without them. Broadband improves our quality of life - many therefore consider it a utility, and see it as a 'right'. It also fuels business.
In any particular street, many residents have a powerful wifi that could serve the entire street. If yours has, say, 200 dwellings, it would be thousands of pounds cheaper if we all got together and shared it - fibre optics, the next generation, is down to £15/month and getting cheaper. People hardly use their landlines now, why do we all have to have one each when we could have a community switchboard? Haringey Council are already providing us with a shared scheme to lower electricity prices, so why not broadband and landlines?
All this is a pipe-dream of course. The Council will eventually offer public wifi I guess, for the same reason it offers other services - because everyone else does, as their civil servants will point out to a Cabinet member or two and, hey presto, a new policy.
I'd like more. I think that many of the 'chattering classes' are willing and able, through forums like this, to conceive of creative ways in which we can make life better for all of us, working in concert with our representatives (the council) to reduce inequality, improve social 'justice' and enhance the quality of our lives through concerted action. That will enrich us more than anything else I can think of in the longer term and we're all in it for the longer term, aren't we?
What seems to me to be missing is 'connectedness' - we try to connect to each other on this forum, why can't we connect more with the body we formed to regulate for us and spend our collective Council Tax? As regards free Wifi, why didn't we press the Council to start with Green Lanes and roll it out so that the traders have it in their shops as well, levelling their playing field too? Bet the increase in Council revenue would more than pay for it.
As several telecomms companies provide Wifi to shops and cafes etc at no cost, paid for by advertising, the Traders Association could maybe do it themselves, but how much cooler would it be if we suggested more things here that make a positive difference and see them actually happen?
The first step is forming a link between the IT department that runs the Council website and you and I - 'the users'. That's often done through a 'users group'. I guess many of us could think of ways that haringey.gov.uk could be improved but I don't think the Council are hearing these voices, many of whom are qualified professionals in their field. What's not to like if they did?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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If I don't need, and don't want, wi-fi, would I still have to pay for it ?
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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Yes, we all pay for many council-provided utilities, whether we use them or not. If it was practical to charge individually, they'd do that I guess, but often it's not - imagine the debates were Council Tax to be more granular...
If it makes a profit, we all benefit likewise of course.
As there already is Council-paid for wifi in public places (CCTV cameras etc) it might save money to share infrastructure and a number could be put on the increased revenue from a 'richer' place.
I'd like to see a lot more info on the local economy so we can take a more objective view as to how much things actually cost versus the benefits they provide.
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In that case, I'm against the idea. I have a perfectly good wired service already.
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Hi john,
You mean that you don't want cheaper broadband at home, or you don't want the council to provide free wifi in the town centres?
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I don't care if the Council do, or do not, provide wi-fi in town centres: I just don't see why I should pay for it when I don't use it.
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If it could be shown that it made money for the council would you be in favour and, if so, how much money would it have to make to win your vote?
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Permalink Reply by 24g2s8fz5ir06 on
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I have to say that my feeling is that the people who will benefit from this kind of thing most are already those who are on the winning side of the digital divide (and can afford ipads and smart phones and £2 plus cups of coffee etc). I am not sure that it's a huge priority in times of cuts to services elsewhere.
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Almost everyone has a phone now, even the most disadvantaged. Technology can help the poorest 'leapfrog' their situation.
They can benefit proportionately more than the richer ones, but I think you are saying that we should not spend energy on something less far away from the 'real' problems that face us.
I don't know how to really measure and thus convince as to how impactful this would be, but I cling to the idea that a 'civilised' society is built on a basic infrastructure that should be widely and freely available, and that particular attention and care should be paid to those less fortunate.
There are a huge range of responses that could and should be made, this is a small one that could pay bigger dividends, and it's something the richer can contribute to so as to benefit the poorer.
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It's not the job of the Council to run profit-making services. Its job is to provide essential services at cost price.
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It is the job of the council to provide services that profit the community, and if those 'public' services can be provided at little or no cost, so much the better.
Council is heavily regulated as to what constitutes abuse of this power. You've got no problem with the BBC making a profit, have you?
The council is not only there to pay out, it also makes profit on a range of things it does that business doesn't want to do and uses that profit to lower our council tax.
It also provides a vital mechanism for business to make profit.
Those people who make money do so partly because we have educated people who can be employed, a transport infrastructure that lorries can use at a reasonable cost etc - built and paid for by the council - we're all in it together.
If we leave public services to the market, we get heavily punished - only the council can do some things for our collective benefit -nobody else will.
The days of 'laissez-faire' capitalism are so over, aren't they?
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Your biggest immediate issue with this is the infrastructure to be able to audit actions and provide a Quality of Service provision within the system. This is essential for any pirate downloads that occur and to prevent leeching through P2P use (of course there are many legitimate uses for P2P software, notably Linux distributions and Video on Demand services).
In effect you would need to replicate the Kingston Telecom setup. This actually slowed progress and adoption of high speed internet.
Finally would you be happy with a council provided data service that is open to council and whoever else to snoop on your activity as they would have access to the raw data logs?
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Thanks Lee - Metropolitan Wifi, as you probably know, has a long history in cities across the world - the issues are eagerly solved one by one by the large providers as there's money in mass adoption. Quality of Service was a major breakthough (mainly through the IETF at Cisco's behest) in the last millenium and with load-balancing a fine art refined by Google, neither are a problem.
Why can' we have fast broadband on our phones whilst outside, and why can't it be free?
Amongst the advances is solving the problems stadiums have - supporting 68,500 simultaneous wifi users with fast download speeds - enough for Green Lanes, surely? I'd like to see parts of our borough tuned into WikiTowns, the way Monmouth has.
With OffCom fining providers for false claims, attention is more than ever paid to the actual reality of what is delivered versus what is advertised.
I'm cheered by the fact that almost all this key technology has been freely given to the world for anyone to use (open source) - supporting the view that the gift economy is not only viable but enriching.
As to snooping, twas ever thus - policemen used to lurk in telephone exchanges and there was a never-denied rumour that everyone with a landline telephone is subject to eavesdropping through the govt's ability to remotely switch on the microphone in anyone's handset.
I don't think you're saying that fear of snooping should stop us using tech, are you? It's enough to be aware that 'they' can see everything you do on any connected system.
We pay a 'hidden' price for using many 'free' services and free wifi, like 'free' gmail, is no exception. I see that we reportedly spied on the G8 delegates by setting up a fake internet cafe with keylogging software on each computer, so nowhere is safe...
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