Better enjoy that free Portland Wi-Fi while you can…the Oregonian and the Portland Business Journal are both reporting the network may soon be sold to the city or shutdown. Word is MetroFi has decided to walk from the deal and is offering to sell the network to the city for $894,000! The company said it will be yank its equipment at the end of June if the city or someone else doesn’t pick up the tab.

This really seems like a crap move by MetroFi, especially when you consider this word of news that the company will be selling its nine city networks across the country. This move casts doubt, I think, on the viability of metro-wide Wi-Fi. We still have all those Personal Telco network hubs out there, but if you aren’t near one and don’t have another way to access the Internet, you’ll probably soon be out of luck.

This is possibly my last post on MB for a while as my grams and moms are visiting for the next couple weeks. Plus, even if we are stoking good debates and some good fun on my posts–I’m not following the correct rules, and I don’t know if I got into writing and especially blogging to follow rules. If I wanted to follow (to me, arduous and self-selecting) rules, I would still be writing for editors of dying publications and/or working at large bureaucratic corporations as I have done in the past and still get offered.

Julian

This post starts in two places:

1. Portland is now considered the green leader of the US by many organizations including apparently Yahoo Green (yep, just heard of this today).

2. This comment to the Tri-Metiquette post earlier from divebarwife, but also from several people that has taken the Etiquette factor out and replaced it with should we fund tri-met more? Is it Tri-met/bike paths, etc vs cars in taxes and so forth.

Here is the Comment: “If a higher percentage of taxes need to go to transit - then that may be the case (don’t know - haven’t done the research) But a higher percent of ALL our taxes, not just select groups of people.”
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Is downtown even more of a zoo than normal, or what?

I don’t normally go downtown during M-F from 9-5 - but I’ve been at the Marriott for meetings since Monday.
I’d normally try and take mass transit - but have needed my car for client outings and/or kid retrieval purposes.

With all of the street construction and building construction and sudden lane closures and big-ass delivery trucks who need to stop in the middle of the road to unload their goods and clueless pedestrians and and and…well, it takes me 30 minutes or more of circling blocks to find a place to park (lots are full early, no less.) Several lights to go crosstown six blocks. Traffic’s snarled everywhere; pedestrians wander around willy-nilly, and people are less than pleasant as a result.

Sure, the out of towners are used to it (although they’re having great fun laughing at our non-working MetroFi.) But *I’m* not!

I’ll certainly be glad to get to my eastside office tomorrow, that’s for sure…

I’ve ranted in the past on how bad MetroFi is, how bad the coverage is, and so on. In the interest of fairness, I thought before leaving I should divulge something:

Lately, MetroFi is working.

I still can’t get it in my house, despite having 2 bars on my Palm. But when I’ve been within a block of a node, with line of sight, I’ve been able to connect downtown, in NW Portland, and in SE Portland in nearly all of my recent attempts.

I still hate the fact that I can’t get a free connection in my home without buying some sort of boosting gear. But MetroFi seems to be pulling it together, and since I’ve been a huge nay-sayer, I needed to share that.

Of course, if you’re still experiencing craptastic service with MetroFi, we’re all ears!

MetroFi, despite having mixed results from local wireless Internet surfers, seems to be gaining a foothold here in Portland. It put out a press release today saying they now have over 11,000 monthly users - a 40% increase since April. It also said over 70 new free outdoor access points had been added.

Any new thoughts on MetroFi? Still getting the same mixed results? Even bothering to use it?

I’m posting this from downtown, using the city’s much maligned MetroFi wireless network. I’ve personally never had a problem connecting, but I know many who have and it’s gotten me curious. Is there a common factor among those who are able to connect or among those who aren’t?

And so, without further ado, I present the pseudo-scientific Metroblog MetroFi (Metro)Survey. If you’ve tried to connect, successful or not, take a minute to answer the questions below and post your answers in the comments.
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Sure, it’s a free service. But really, how much of a “service” is it if it doesn’t actually serve us?

Here I am, in downtown Portland, on my work laptop trying to tune in to the MetroFi power that the City continues to take such pride in.

And here’s the result:

Again, I say “Ugh.”

Scattershot post today:

First, as everyone knows, we’re about to the end of the Blazers season with tomorrow night’s home game against Golden State. I’m guessing we lose, since we’re missing Zach, LaMarcus, Brandon and Joel P., but we’ll have pulled 32 wins in a season where 35 at full strength was not only reasonable, but attainable, and all-in-all there was a definite improvement.

As the off-season approaches, there are a few items of business to take care of. The Blazers need to hire a new president (Casey Hohldal at the O’s BlazerBlog is all over this topic). They need to have a good draft, and make some trades (Dave at BlazersEdge discusses this). Kerry Eggers at the Trib covers many of the items on the list. (Thanks, Casey, for the link).

Meanwhile, the Lumberjax just finished their season. Sadly, I didn’t make any of the games, though I well and truly planned to. Oh, well, there’s always next year.

The Portland Beavers season is upon us, though, and with my current job I actually have the prospect of taking in a couple of Businessman’s Specials. And Timber time is here, too, though I personally don’t find that quite so exciting.

In all of that, we are out of the time of year where I follow sports in earnest. I’m a football and basketball guy. I’ve tried to be the Metroblog Jack-of-all-Sports, but despite having posted about all sorts, including Roller Derby, I’m predicting a slow sports season for myself, probably until the NBA draft.

Currently, I’m focussing on more full-filling subjects. Like food. And restaurants. You can read my thoughts on those over on the new Portland Restaurant Reviews by Regular Folks (wordy, I know) site.

I imagine here I’ll be switching to snarking on local news and politics and continuing to bitch and moan about MetroFi until I can establish a reliable connection with the pole around the corner…

I’m reading through the City document that basicall signs off on continuing to work with MetroFi. And I’m confused.

On page 2, in the paragraph entitled “Throughput” under the heading “Performance Criteria Results” the following curious oxymoronic statement is made.

Uptown Services initial tests showed that 100% of access points (70 of 70) achieved 1 Mbps of downstream connectivity and 99% of access points (69 of 70) achieved 256 Kbps of upstream connectivity. Uptown Services re-tested 6 access points that did not initially achieve 1 Mbps of downstream connectivity and 2 access points that did not achieve 256 Kbps of upstream connectivity. This re-testing demonstrated 5 of 6 access
points achieved 1 Mbps of downstream connectivity and 1 of 2 access points achieved 256 Kbps of upstream connectivity. One access point at 24th and Couch was not able to achieve either 1 Mbps of upstream connectivity or 256 Kbps of downstream connectivity.

Let’s parse that.

1. Initial tests showed 100% of access points tested had 1Mbps of downstream connectivity.
2. Apparently, despite that, there was a need to re-test 6 points that didn’t initially achieve that standard.
3. Then, despite the initial statements that 100% of the test points had the 1 Mbps of downstream connectivity, one ultimately was found never to have achieved that.

Huh?

Similarly,

1. 69 of 70 points tested had 256 Kbps upstream connectivity.
2. Two points that didn’t were re-tested.
3. Finally, again, 69 of 70 were found to have the 256 Kbps upstream connectivity.

These just don’t make sense. I’d think that the City folk relying upon this sort of document should’ve required some sort of re-write or clarification before they made a decision, because I don’t see how you can read that and come away with any sort of understanding of what’s being said.

And here’s a question: does “throughput” equal “access?” Because the general concensus of my commenters in my various MetroFi rants is that access is spotty at best and, in many cases, non-existent. Or, as I suspect, does “throughput” just measure the capacity of the signal from the beacon?

Another interesting result in the “Availabilty” section:

Based on Uptown Services, City of Portland, and MetroFi data, MetroFi’s network demonstrates an uptime capability in excess of 99%.

Uptown Services extended availability testing showed that MetroFi’s network had a 91% uptime. Given the extremely limited number of access points (one at 4th and Madison) from which Uptown Services was able to test, the standard error for this estimate falls within the 99% uptime figure listed in the RFP.

Huh? They were testing availability from one access point and determining “uptime” from that? Ludicrous. If that’s how they determine success, how would they find failure? I’d think that uptime should be determined by testing a wide range of access points and noting how “up” the entire system is…

I have no dog in this race, except that I’m a citizen who’d like to believe our government is working responsibly to meet the needs of the citizenry and/or the promises of the government. I don’t know that we need city-wide WiFi, but if we’re going to pursue it, we should be damned sure that our investment of money, time, resources, and whatever else is resulting in what’s expected. And if the partners who’ve been selected to meet the objectives aren’t holding up their end of the bargain, action should be taken.

Remember the Water Bureau? I feel like MetroFi is sliding down that path. And the City continues to enable this state-sponsored mediocrity. We may be the City that Works, but we sure aren’t doing it over City Wi-Fi anytime soon.

Anyway, I continue to commend you to the Unwire page, where some non-City and non-MetroFi types are monitoring things. As a disclaimer, the people running that site appear to have a dog in the fight, as many are associated with Personal Telco, but at the same time they are providing accountability in a system where it’s needed. And their “independent” testing reflects more closely on the experience of both myself and the many readers who’ve weighed in on their MetroFi experience, so I’ll be deferring to their test results, which apparently are forthcoming…

And nothing happened. Actually, worse. Almost nothing happened.

I’ve been bagging on Metro-Fi for some time. Although I applaud the concept of free city-wide WiFi, I think the perpetual promise of it, combined with perpetual under-performance, sucks.

In past posts I’ve noted that there’s a Metro-Fi beacon near my house in SE Portland (about 100′ away, in fact) and I’ve been continually irked by the combination of its presence and the entire lack of signal when I try to use it. That, in fact, has been just the teeniest bit more annoying to me than being downtown with towers everywhere, signal everywhere, and a nigh-perpetual lack of connectibility.

So I had only a faint glimmer of excitement at a recent e-mail I got, which announced the following:

MetroFi Doubles Its Coverage Area in Portland!

We’re very happy to announce that we turned on a large new section of our MetroFi Portland Wi-Fi network on April 12, 2007 - effectively increasing its size by 140%. This means that thousands of Portland residents, commuters, businesses and visitors can now surf the web using MetroFi’s fast, free wireless Internet service in more areas within Portland.

So on Friday, I decided to try again. And now, there’s a signal at my home.

But here’s the rub. Whereas it used to be super-annoying to me to have a beacon with no signal, now I’m in the same vein as the rest of town in having a signal and not being able to connect. In several tries this weekend (including two sitting about 10′ away from the utility pole on which the beacon is mounted, with lots of signal showing up on my WiFi-enabled device that I regularly use to connect to signals all over the place), I have tried and successfully failed (which is successful by virtue of the fact that I was mostly trying, at that point, to reinforce my own concept of the futilty of Metro-Fi) every single time I’ve tried this weekend to get an actual connection accomplished.

So, I continue to regard Metro-Fi as a failure, even as it’s being touted (by the city and itself) as a success. How ’bout you?