One of the few things the city government officials did right was setting up a free, public wireless Internet connection in the Quarter. Now, BellSouth wants to shut it down.
City CIO says he’d rather go to jail than shut down the city’s free wireless network.
March 22, 2006Another hurricane season starts in June, but this year it’s a political storm that is threatening to shut down New Orleans’ jury-rigged Wi-Fi service.
After Katrina ravaged the Big Easy six months ago, Greg Meffert, the city’s chief information officer, got downtown businesses back online by opening the city’s wireless mesh network–originally deployed to link surveillance cameras–to anyone who needed it. For free.
“Now it is the lifeblood for so many businesses,” Mr. Meffert told Red Herring. With Internet service still down in more than half the city, he estimates more than 15,000 people use the city’s 512 kbps (kilobits per second) network.
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Now telecommunication lobbyists are trying to shut down the network, and Mr. Meffert says it looks like the state legislature will agree. State law prohibits cities from providing more than a relatively sluggish 128-kbps network, but New Orleans offered its faster network as an emergency relief effort.
Wow, what a crappy thing to do.  I really hope the state legislature has enough compassion/foresight/balls to change that law. What a way to further cripple businesses already struggling to get by.