NYC wireless efforts and the police
Sascha Meinrath says it would cost $15-20 million to provide all of NYC with a wireless network. It hasn't happened for a long list of reasons — problems with contracts, turf wars, vendors, all kinds of reasons.
According to the NYT, NYC just spent $140 million to build a super-duper hub-and-spoke wireless system for the police to use in the subways, and the city isn't done. It will cost another $60 million to make it operational. And it won't work. So the police on the street won't be able to communicate with the police underground.
Sascha says the reason it's not working is that the super-duper underground wireless network has many many hubs. With lots of hubs, there's lots of interference. Putting all the intelligence in the hubs also leaves the receivers as dumb, lonely boxes — if the hub stops working, the receiver is done for. Sascha's saying that NYC could have a cheap underground wireless network if the city was willing to let the receivers be intelligent parts of the architecture — a mesh, in other words.
I've written before about Sascha's mesh adventures, which I find quite inspiring. I'm confident he knows what he's talking about. But the clash of cultures won't work — public safety people want hard-wired, centralized, hierarchical, stable solutions, not ad hoc networks they don't quite understand.
It's too bad - $200 million for something that doesn't work, and two mindsets that can't understand each other.
More here from Tom Evslin.