While doing research on another telecom issue today I found out that WTA is suspending its wireless service on its buses as part of its service reductions during this period. Many private businesses, like some coffee shops, have turned off their wi-fi as well. Since our government, especially our public works director Eric Johnston and IT director Marty Mulholland, often cite these "free" often low-performance connections as a way for everyone to stay connected, and use them to justify the complete lack of action on the city's part, I realized that this probably means that a huge portion of our population is not connected in a meaningful way.   

So I said to myself, "what's left for people to use who don't have a good connection at home for whatever reason?" Obviously, until we have a county-wide network our options are limited, but what can we do right now? Again, we've offered to help install gear to extend the network for free. 

Knowing that many people, including students, are working from limited hotspots in their cars, I decided to test the public connection at Bloedel Donovan Park. It was a rainy time of the day, and I did as recommended. I parked as close as I could to the building and stayed in my car. This is a common situation for our students. My signal strength fluctuated and averaged out at about 50%. I was using a good Linux Laptop with a good wireless card in it and I started to run my normal, hour-long, load test. Please remember that on top of all of this, wireless connections are shared bandwidth.

The short story is that the connection performed so poorly, and fluctuated so much, that it's hard for me to really give you the numbers. The latency was 2,000 ms, the up and down speeds (when they didn't hang) were 3.8 Mbits at best and often nothing. The city either blocked me at about 10 minutes of use or the connection totally failed at that point. They don't like ti when you test publicly owned resources and see if they're providing what we've paid for in our taxes after all. Only they know for sure what happened and I'm sure some whimsical tale will follow this posting. I'm pretty sure I was the only one actively using the connection at the time of the test as the park was pretty empty, but a few others could have been as well.

So what does this mean? Well, imagine you are a poor student relying on unreliable wireless tech like this to get your work done. You show up to a spot like this and share the connection with 10 other people. The situation I describe could easily be 10 times worse. The really odd thing about all of this is that Bloedel Donovan's connections are hooked up to the city's existing publicly owned fiber-optic network. So even if they were slow, the speed should have been consistent and the latency low. Sure, an outdoor antenna, like the type we've offered to install, would have made a big difference, but I get the sense that there are other underlying issues as well. I am especially annoyed that while our heroic first responders and caregivers go to work in hazardous conditions every day and we should be learning from their examples, the city's IT and Public Works Departments aren't doing much to help and certainly aren't leading by example. We should all be doing what we can to help right now and using our expertise to help if and when we can. Again, that's why we keep offering to help hook up hotspots, etc.

Please keep in mind that the combined salaries of just the IT and Public Works Directors are enough to run 2 miles of fiber, in 2x2" conduit, with 144 strands in it every year. On top of that, they also refuse to get out of the way and let concerned citizens, who also happen to be IT pros, help them and their fellow citizens for free. Why won't' they help? Why won't they let us help? They have ignored answering these questions and have reverted to non-transparent meetings where they talk at Seth and push their agenda. I was really hoping this administration would believe in transparency. Hopefully, this will change when the curve flattens.  

What was Mayor Fleetwood's reaction to all of this? After knowing that Eric Johnston was involved in at least one public records violation, actively refuses to establish a proper Dig Once Policy, went out of his way to protect the big telecoms on every possible occasion, forbid the public from talking to the new Climate Energy Manager (Seth Vidana) about the ecological impacts of technology, and generally abuses his position to work against the public interest, Seth rewarded Eric by appointing him to be his full public works director today. But not before having a non-transparent, closed-door, 5 hour meeting with him last Friday. No public broadband experts were invited. I went to one of those meetings years ago. Eric yelled at me for about an hour and protected the interests of Verizon and AT&T. Still, we hope to meet with Eric to move the ball forward. We do need this after all. Eric tells Seth he can't wait to meet with me, but has made no attempt to do so. I guess that's the kind of guy Seth wants at the helm. Still, we're making progress on a lot of other fronts and I'll have some exciting announcements soon. I know these are trying times and Seth may just be overwhelmed, and obviously made a bad decision under stress... Please, write to Seth and remind him of the promises he made on the campaign trail, and his vision for Bellingham, including in relation to broadband. There is a lot of support on the council. Do we want to be in this situation again down the road? We need to make an investment in real infrastructure.