Internet

[Stu Jackson]

Originally Posted by StuM

There , fixed it for you.

Stu,who are the ratepayers? If a city has four or more different internet providers, how does that work? Are you suggesting thst the fees ALL users pay to their providers then are used to build and operate the "free" wifit city-wide? I'm sure, for example, in my Shaw example, that the monthly fees I pay for my TV, phone & internet service at hom are partially used to fund the "free" wifi that I can access almost wherever I go, at least locally. Do I get this right?

[Jdege]

I know nada about running a marina, and only the basics of configuring wifi, but I'd not expect a marina to provide free wifi to everybody in the harbor.

What I often see in hotels is three tier -

• totally free, with limited bandwidth in the lobby.
• charge your credit card on sign-in, throughout the rest of the hotel
• free, throughout the hotel, if you have rented a room.

Seems to me that this would be a reasonable approach for a marina.

• Provide a low-bandwidth connection to anyone, for free, simply for good-will. It doesn't cost much of anything, once the rest of the hardware is in place. This might be throttled on throughput, it might have a limited amount of total data (100MB?), but the essence is that the volume be kept low enough not to interfere with the paying customers.
• Provide a high-quality, high-speed connection as a paid service. Once this becomes a revenue source, instead of a loss-leader, there should be funding to provide a quality service.
• Include access to that high-quality, high-speed connection to actual marina customers. People who are renting a slip or a mooring get access at no additional charge.

[Auspicious]

Originally Posted by StuM

Great idea: once they come up with some way to tax internet users to pay for it - just like they do road users with fuel taxes, registration fees etc.

As has been pointed out, places like McDonalds or Ruby Tuesday buy into AT&T WiFi or Xfinity. Between the revenue from the site (fee for the service of serving their customers who are more likely to choose to stop in those businesses because of WiFi) and the contribution from the service provider (who are motivated by the interest of their customers in having Internet all over) the costs are built into what customers pay for everything else.

Community wireless is usually a public-private partnership between local government (taxes) and some business association like a Chamber of Commerce (dues) it gets paid for as a utility like street lights.

Originally Posted by masonc

I don't know much about marina fees, but I think they charge for everything, power, water, CATV, internet, correct me if I am wrong.

Some marinas meter electricity. Not many.

Water is rarely if other charged for in the United States.

CATV is usually fee-for-service but is dying out in many marinas.

Internet is built into the rates you pay for your slip almost everywhere.

Originally Posted by SSgtPitt

I have no routers, boosters, antennas yet and use only a MiFi and my cell phone....but I'm not cruising yet. That happens this winter.

You are at the bow wave of what I see coming. WiFi is a great technology but the implementation in marinas is so poor and cellular is getting so easy that more and more people are just giving up on WiFi. It's one less thing to mess with.

Heck, I use cellular even in places that do have WiFi because the sign-up/sign-in process is too time consuming. It just isn't worth it.

[a64pilot]

Originally Posted by StuM

Great idea: once they come up with some way to tax internet users to pay for it - just like they do road users with fuel taxes, registration fees etc.

TAANSTAFL.

Yes,
Remember when TV was "free" paid for by commercials?
Then along came cable which you paid for but was commercial free.
Now you pay to watch even more commercials that you did previously when it was free, such is the model.
Greed will make sure that someone will pay for anything that you get.
The real trick of late is to make "others" pay, free cell phones in the US for example.

[hellosailor]

A friend of mine used to be a systems programmer at AT&T, and then the regional Bell when that was broken apart. One of their nightmares was generating (in that region) something like 30 million line-detailed itemized telephone bills on the first of every month.

When someone pointed out how much it was costing to do the accounting for all those calls, and print them, and mail them...That's when we got a massive push to flat-rate calling plans. The money they save by not billing every call, is more than what the calls cost.

So while many folks have proposed there should be a "penny tax" on emails to shut down spam, or that broadband should be metered, the costs and upset associated with that all add up to a big disincentive to do it. In the US the cable and broadband industries are seeing the same thing, and after they've all tried "metered" programs...there's been a big pushback to "unlimited" with various catches, just like the cellular companies. For the same reasons.

Not that "subsidized" is fair or equal, but it often beats the costs of breaking things out.

[Zven]

Originally Posted by Jdege

• Provide a low-bandwidth connection to anyone, for free, simply for good-will...
• Provide a high-quality, high-speed connection as a paid service...
• Include access to that high-quality, high-speed connection to actual marina customers. People who are renting a slip or a mooring get access at no additional charge.

That makes a lot of sense...
Keeping the base product easy and free creates goodwill and allows anyone to give the system a test ride. It allows an outsider to send that all-important urgent email in a pinch, for which they will be grateful (this has happened to me more than once).
Heavy users will also probably understand that their use needs paying for, and they will hopefully appreciate the quality they get.

[sailorboy1]

In speaking with the marina guy today on the subject he says that there is also a setting on the marina system that assigns a IP to each user and it has a time limit associated with it. Apparently the default that comes on system is like a week. Meanwhile boats have left, but their address is still assigned and is clogging up the system. But if the system is reset it wipes out everyone and the assignments restart.

They said once their changed the time to a day most of their issues went away. People still there just got new assignments and those that had left got freed up.

[hellosailor]

sailorboy-
It sounds like your marina is using a clever kludge by manually setting the "Time To Die" (TTD) of each IP address. You can actually do that with any server or router. It doesn't throttle data, but it does cut off any device when that time is up.
Normally every device that is set to automatically connect will automatically renew it's address when the TTD has run out, but changing the system to force that manually is like changing the door codes on hotel rooms. Kinda guarantees the guest has to pay again next week.
The default TTD can also be set for a system, specifically so it DOES purge frequently and not run out of addresses. I would expect that to be a problem unless it was a terribly busy marina, or a very small router.

Clever but effective, as long as you don't mind doing things manually.

[StuM]

Originally Posted by Stu Jackson

Stu,who are the ratepayers? If a city has four or more different internet providers, how does that work? Are you suggesting thst the fees ALL users pay to their providers then are used to build and operate the "free" wifit city-wide? I'm sure, for example, in my Shaw example, that the monthly fees I pay for my TV, phone & internet service at hom are partially used to fund the "free" wifi that I can access almost wherever I go, at least locally. Do I get this right?

Sorry another case of two countries divided by a common language. I was using the UK/NZ/Aus etc meaning of "ratepayer".

rate·pay·er
1. North American
a customer of a public utility.
2. (in the UK) a person required to pay local property taxes.

I think you will find that the City pays the ISPs for that "free WiFi". And it is paid from the city's revenue - which is basically payments made by property owners in the city (known variously are "property tax" and "rates").