Bye-Bye Wifi

Those who have had the pleasure of listening to me rant about internet know I have been a passionate advocate for the last 7 months for the concept of Municipal wireless internet (aka muni wifi). Since Minneapolis was a pioneer in the country in building what has been heralded as the only or first successful, large metropolitan wireless internet blanket, I was set on supporting this effort as a subscriber. I closed my ears when several people offered early reports that it sucked and that they had a terrible signal. I felt, to be fair, we needed to give it an honest try and see for ourselves. Besides that the system remained under construction, the SLF (signal luck factor, as I like to call it) is highly dependent on the location of your home in proximity to a relay node.

While the service was without frequent issues for the first 5 months, it all went down the toilet when Spring arrived. We were told that leaves caused interference, and that adjustments would resolve the problems. Well, how could anyone possibly predict that tree branches would grow leaves? In any case, after 10 days without service in early June, USI offered us a month free to compensate for the now-frequent outages. The service came back, and stayed up, for several weeks. A week ago, it went down again. This isn't the typical DSL or Cable outage where you unplug and replug the power cord and wa-la, it's fixed. This is no service, solid, no matter how many times you recycle the power. The curious part of the leaves philosophy was that our signal strength (the Ruckus modem's connection with the nearest antenna; our house is only the 3rd from the end of the block...with a node stationed right around the corner) was always strong. Even on a lower level, on the opposite side of the house from where the signal originates.

It appears that our connection has been maintained but other nearby nodes lost the relay. Even 3/4 mi away at Starbucks, it is working. So it is a very localized problem, and they probably have a long list of these. Thinking this should be fixable we made 2 phone calls until we eventually reached a human, who informed us they could not provide any form of ETA for fixing the issue...they did not know if it would be a couple days or a couple months. That's right, months. Not "Maybe 3 or 4 days", not "We'll call you," not "Well, we don't work on the weekend", not even "There are parts on order, it just might be working before you get your car back from hail hell." Just 'we dunno'. Even after that round of bad news, we decided out of fairness and, so as not to be impulsive, to wait another 4 days before pulling the plug. I called Comcast last night and reactivated our previous high speed; for only $43/month we were instantly back online. Although it's expensive, we know it works. All the time.

In case any of you are considering signing up for Mpls Muni, I've provided a helpful map of service availability. Maybe in about 3 years, when they have 60,000 customers instead of 6,000 customers, they'll have these things fixed and we'll try again.



Postscript: After we attempted to cancel they offered us 2 months free to "save us." We already had one month free... what good is a free service that doesn't work? Too little, too late. Very happy to be back with CHS.