This here is probably one of the problems with helping the poor. When people are spending other people's money to help other people, they don't spend it very well.

As for the cost... For the record, I've lived over a year around the poverty line... In Australia--An even more expensive country. I also did a loop around the country, saw and went everywhere I wanted to go, spent most of my time at the beach or mountains, and surfing... and oh yea, had internet the entire time. Even amortizing that cost over ten years, this is still double what I spent on wifi.

Man, I wasn't making a political statement. I'm just saying that setting up a wifi access point for other people is not like setting up a wifi access point for yourself, and six grand isn't even going to get your wired uplink connection extended across the street.

I was just saying that if you want a wifi access point that supplies a bunch of users, well, someone is gonna have to hook that up to the internet, and deal with the inevitable abuse problems that come from providing internet access to people you don't know. And yes, a lot of people do this for free, which is probably why it seems so cheap for you. Which is fine; I mean, I'm all for people giving out free services, I use a lot of free software myself, but don't pretend that those people aren't giving you value, or that it wouldn't cost a lot of money if you didn't want exactly what they were giving.

Even if you've got free labor, you've gotta run power and internet access out to that wifi access point. Real internet connections are expensive; even consumer-grade stuff is expensive if the provider isn't already where you are, and consumer-grade connections shouldn't be shared.

Have you ever tried to talk a network provider into running a line across the street, when they don't already have customers in that area? Here in silicon valley we're talking in the high thousands/low tens of thousands of dollars to get a connection across a street.

I mean, it's great that you were able to find wifi for yourself on your vacation, but that doesn't have anything to do with how much effort and money it costs to maintain those wifi access points.

>wifi for yourself on your vacation, but that doesn't have anything to do with how much effort and money it costs to maintain those wifi access points

If I am able to provide a wifi hotspot for a year at some cost, that has some relevance to providing a wifi hotspot at some other cost.

>If I am able to provide a wifi hotspot for a year at some cost, that has some relevance to providing a wifi hotspot at some other cost.

You weren't providing a hotspot to others in any systematic sort of way. You were consuming internet services provided for free or near free by other people.

I'd compare it to the difference between spending for a year feeding yourself through asking for alms or through the McDonalds dollar menu, and running a restaurant. Both involve food, but the former does not predict the difficulty level of the latter.

It just doesn't matter what you want to compare it to. The reality is that you could buy them all cell phones + data plans and it would be a fraction of the cost.

My issue was not with if the access points made sense or not... my issue was with the idea that a few grand, one time, was a lot of money to keep a wifi hotspot that wasn't on an existing network running for very long.

It wouldn't occur to me to just give people low end data plans, because for office environments? even the very high end data plans are not acceptable compared to a quality wifi setup. You might very well be right that the low end data plans are good enough for this use case, that the hit you take in reliability and accessibility is worth it to save some money.

This is actually... a problem that I (and I think a lot of technical people have) when looking at solutions; we want a good solution, and our every instinct shouts in horror when you suggest something trashy that is going to be broken half the time. But... as you point out, there are a lot of people who's expectations are so low that the low-end cellular data plan seems just fine.

It certainly seems to me like if you could get a good municipal wifi setup, that'd be worth a lot to the community. Of course, most of the 'community wifi' attempts I've seen have been failures, because making wifi work at scale with random users is a lot harder than it looks, but I think the win is big enough that it's worth trying again every few years, as we gain better wifi technologies.

But really? I'm a sysadmin, not a social worker. I can tell you a lot about setting up wifi access points, and about getting network access where there isn't any network access. I can't tell you what issues you are gonna have trying to give homeless people internet access, or what issues you might have trying to give them special phones (all the really cheap cellular providers around here don't allow you to bring your own device) or how reliable network access has to be in order for it to be useful to the homeless population- I just was offended by the implication that setting up a multi user WIFI AP for random users in places that don't have wired connections is cheap or easy.

>. Even amortizing that cost over ten years, this is still double what I spent on wifi.

A hotspot provides access for an untold number of people, potentially hundreds. Of course it's more expensive than your individual bill.

I was speaking in context of what facts the article stated. I would not assume 100+ users per hotspot given the total population is 834. At 50+11 hotspots that's around 10+ users per hotspot.

I could provide wifi access to 10 people with only my cheap data bill + phone. It wouldn't be an ideal situation, but it would still be a better user experience than the dial-up internet I grew up with.

>I could provide wifi access to 10 people with only my cheap data bill + phone.

So, you mean violate the AUP on your phone and push the costs for the people selling you the data plan upwards? sure, maybe that'd kinda work until the upstream noticed.

If you mean that it would have been cheaper to just give each homeless person their own phone +data plan... that might actually be a better idea, if you can find a cheap enough data plan/phones and you aren't supporting that many homeless people.

To go back to the restaurant example, you have to hand out a lot of soup before running a soup kitchen becomes cheaper than just handing out McDonald's "free item from the dollar menu" coupons.

That's a reasonable thing to consider, assuming that the quality is good enough.

Counting the homeless population is a difficult endeavor. The number constantly fluctuates and often the official number provided will have a political bias. That said, I did miss the part saying only official tent cities are targeted, which changes my estimates a bit.

You're still underestimating the man hours, equipment costs, and recurring nature of this endeavor. And this service is providing a needed connection to important information, contact with loved ones, and a safe source of entertainment. It is not comparable to the luxury service you grew up with.

Single guy at or around the poverty level is different then a family. How did you make enough income for "poverty line"? Sounds like there is more to this story.

Gap year doing a little contract work on the side.

Anyways there are poverty rate statistics for single people, and families.

And for the record, I was hardly roughing it. I met an awesome French girl who claimed to have spent 6 months in Oz on under 1k EUR (doing mostly woof'ing).

You got down-voted because you dared to say that tax money gets wasted by bureaucrats. HN people worship government wealth redistribution programs and will never admit that they are often corrupt and wasteful.

He got downvoted because he has no understanding of how expensive it is to build a network of public wi-fi hotspots, and compared it to sticking his router beside his window and sharing his home broadband connection.

Literally everything about public wifi, from the wiring and build costs, to the hardware and antennas, to the bandwidth itself is significantly more expensive. $6,100 per point sounds completely reasonable.

This is just wrong, and missing the point.

The article states they are providing up to 834 people with internet access with 50+11 hot spots.

I shared a 20$ data plan with two+ travelmates while on gap year in Australia, and it worked extremely well. $7/person cost. Give or take for US data rates and inflation since then.

Even with generous assumptions, these wifi hot spots are at least 50x, and coule be 100x, that cost.

So worst case scenario, just buy them all smart phones and data plans for a small fraction of the cost of this current setup.

Not sure if it applies here, but cell towers also have limits. Especially if the area is somewhat remote (think music festivals, etc).

The simple fact is you could do it cheaper, but you either pay for expertise or hardware. If you don't have a skilled network guy volunteering time, it's going to cost, even if you do, it's going to cost only a bit less.

When you look at it from a marginal utility standpoint, it would have to be thousands of times more wasteful for it to be as wasteful as not redistributing it from the top.

hi, its me a guy who thinks that public programs are often wasteful and corrupt who also thinks that in many cases they are still probably a better idea than privitization

I see. I know my comments are often intended to strike debate, rather than state something I already know all will agree with. But maybe I should have been more clear that I am against waste and for better effective improvements in human welfare and dignity. I'm not againdt redistribution, just the way it is done.