“I feel happy! I feel happy!”
Posted by Russell Senior on 5 July 2008On the evening of July 2, we took a little loop drive around the heart of what had been the MetroFi network. We discovered that, indeed, the network was largely gone, at least as visible in the 2.4GHz band. We did find an exception, however, when we drove along a promontory on the shoulder of Mt Tabor. We saw one SkyPilot still beaconing MetroFi-Free/MetroFi-Premium. We consulted our listing of BSSID’s to identify where it was located, and then today as we were driving nearby, we stopped and succeeed in associating and connecting to the internet through it.
So even though it’ll be stone dead in a moment, if you want to get your free tubes from MetroFi-Free a little bit longer, there’s at least one place in town to do it.
“I think I’ll go for a walk!”
MetroFi schedules Portland shutoff for June 30
Posted by Russell Senior on 20 June 2008The Portland Business Journal, Associated Press and the Oregonian are reporting that, according to officials at the City of Portland, MetroFi plans to turn off their Portland network on June 30th. The equipment is to be removed during the month of July.
Meanwhile, the Personal Telco Project is reminding people that there are still an amazing number of wifi networks in Portland (about 100 times what MetroFi was ever going to deploy), and that ordinary citizens and businesses can help make ubiquitous free wifi a reality by participating in its provision.
Reporters sometimes get basic facts wrong
Posted by Russell Senior on 22 March 2008The New York Times is running a story that mentions the Portland wifi network operated by MetroFi in passing. Unless something happened recently without us knowing about it, the story gets things substantially wrong. Here’s what Ian Urbina wrote, in part:
In Tempe, Ariz., and Portland, Ore., for example, hundreds of subscribers have found themselves suddenly without service as providers have cut their losses and either abandoned their networks or stopped expanding capacity.
Urbina, or to be fair perhaps his editors under pressures of space, conflate the Tempe, Arizona and Portland networks into a single sentence and consequently propagate an inaccurate perception of what is happening in Portland. First of all, as we understand it, MetroFi Portland has very few paying subscribers. According to Logan Kleier as of a few months ago, certainly not hundreds. The vast majority of its users utilize the advertising-supported service. Second of all, MetroFi has not (again, unless something has happened very recently) abandoned their network, suddenly cutting off service. There are plenty of places in Portland without service, and without any prospect of service, and even places “with” service might not actually have service. But that is different.
The MetroFi Portland network has substantially stalled. The outward signs provide no obvious prospect it will ever be finished as originally envisioned. However, hundreds of subscribers in Portland have not suddenly lost service they had previously, as far as we can tell.
Interview of Chuck Haas on OPB this morning
Posted by Russell Senior on 21 February 2008We were alerted to an interview (unclipped version) with Chuck Haas (MetroFi CEO) that OPB ran this morning on its radio service. It was interesting to us in that we finally heard a (still incomplete) justification that indicates the basis of their ~30% coverage claim. He said it was based on a population weighting, claiming that 150,000 out of 540,000 people had access to the service. He didn’t get into any details of the assumptions that go into the 150,000 people number. We have previously estimated that on a spatial basis their existing network covers only about 4.2% of the 134 square-mile city’s outdoor areas to the “90% probability of a connection to a 30 mW client device” standard. Our estimate is based on our recent survey of the SkyPilots we did in December, and a 300-foot coverage radius that we found during our testing of the Proof-of-Concept network last spring. Logan Kleier has said that the City and MetroFi are using a 500-foot radius, but even assuming that, you only get about 11-15% of the area covered (depending on how many of the SkyPilots are actually functional). To get to 30% on a population basis, roughly speaking, you’d have to assume that the population density of the covered areas is twice as high as the city as a whole. We wonder if that’s true.
Also, as part of the interview Chuck was asked about SideGuide. He described it as “much less obtrusive”, while the interviewer expressed skepticism of that claim, comparing it to pop-ups. In response to a question about the privacy of surfing behavior, “data on the sites you are visiting are tracked … what is that information used for?”, Chuck ducked and pointed at Microsoft, which in turn was not specifically responsive to the question.
You are welcome, I guess
Posted by Russell Senior on 9 January 2008
In today’s Willamette Week, MetroFi is named Rogue of the Week based largely on our recent survey. In the piece, MetroFi’s vice president of operations Lucie Poulicakos calls our report “useful” and promises that corrections are on their way. We are perplexed by the “useful” characterization, given that the information we provide should be easily within their grasp as a simple matter of operating their network. Largely, what took us 35 hours of driving around should be immediately available to them from their network management software.
We hope the promised corrections are better than the ones we’ve seen so far this week, with SE 8th and Division Place finding itself relocated to rural Clackamas County. As for the network itself, the SkyPilot with the dangling power cord was, as of yesterday afternoon, still dangling and still marked on their map as “In service”.
Slight modifications to MetroFi’s map appear
Posted by Russell Senior on 8 January 2008Sometime on Sunday or Monday (January 6-7, 2008), a few new changes to the MetroFi map appeared:
- The SkyPilot map location at SE 9th and Division is removed and replaced with one at SE 8th and Division, however:
- They still claim it is “In service” and had it been operating during our recent survey (Dec 19-30, 2007) we surely would have noticed it had it moved a single block;
- The latitude/longitude they provide for the new location is out near Estacada, which seems rather unlikely.
- New SkyPilots appear on the map (the SkyPilots themselves were there already) at three locations we had noted in the survey summary we posted recently:
- SE Hawthorne Blvd and 92nd (they repeat a typo of “BL VD” from another entry);
- SE Stark and 76th; and
- SE Stark and 90th.
- The missing status that we had found at the SW 1st and Meade location has been fixed to read “Coming soon”.
It is important to say that Unwire PDX Watch is not out to get MetroFi. All we are out to get is The Truth. As far as we can tell, substantial errors remain uncorrected (and new ones have been introduced) on the MetroFi map.
MetroFi’s Portland network slipping into unmitigated decay?
Posted by Russell Senior on 5 January 2008A couple weeks ago we commented on how, despite earlier assurances, dozens of new access points did not appear to be going live over the last few months. We had based this observation on 
a comparison of roughly weekly snapshots of the MetroFi map. Since October 26, 2007 the map has recorded the following changes:
- between October 31 and November 2, a “Coming soon” access point appeared on the map at 4400 NE Broadway
- between November 9 and 18, that “Coming soon” access point disappeared from 4400 NE Broadway and reappeared at 416 NE Brazee
- between December 1 and December 14, the “Coming soon” access point at 416 NE Brazee was replaced with an “In service” access point at 2432 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. In the same period, a latitude/longitude correction was made, moving the spot on the map intended for SE Division Street and 57th Avenue about 1000 feet from SE Lincoln to SE Division.
When Chuck Haas said that the service area had expanded substantially since October, we were perplexed by the disparity and inquired to MetroFi about just which new access points had gone live since October. We are still waiting for an answer. Their map indicates anemic growth at best. But then we began wondering, just how accurate is that map? There is only one reliable way to find out. Go check. So, between December 19th and Decemeber 30th we spent about 35 hours doing just that. From the locations provided on their map, we endeavored to drive underneath each one of the 677 SkyPilot access points that MetroFi claims exist.
(Read on …)
MSN Sideguide?
Posted by Russell Senior on 26 September 2007I happened to read about something this last weekend that had the potential to make MetroFi substantially less attractive and/or useful, particularly to people who do not use Microsoft operating systems. The link says, in part:
Codenamed Shadow, the main purpose of MSN Sideguide is to fund the free wifi networks that Microsoft is currently testing in Oakland and Portland with its ISP partner, MetroFi - the wifi connection will be dropped if Sideguide is not running.
There are two problems with this:
- Assuming Sideguide runs only on Microsoft operating systems, and if it is required as that quote seems to indicate, then a substantial fraction of laptops, including Apple and Linux based systems, out there won’t be able to use MetroFi-Free
- Even if Sideguide runs on non-Microsoft operating systems, this seems to require running some foreign software on your system, which introduces both security and privacy concerns that are not present in the current advertising system. The Sideguide software apparently monitors your surfing behavior as well as possibly what is on your system’s harddisk.
I have made a query to Logan Kleier, the City’s project manager about this, and he said he was looking into it. I managed to connect to MetroFi-Free today by parking near a SkyPilot while out running errands and saw no evidence that it had been deployed yet, but the link above clearly indicates that Portland is a target for this.
Uptown Services report finally appears
Posted by Russell Senior on 26 May 2007On Friday, May 25th, sometime after I sent out a press release which included a note that the Uptown Services report had not yet been published, the City published the Uptown Services report. You can download it here: http://www.portlandonline.com/shared/cfm/image.cfm?id=157216.
Caleb Phillips and I have been awaiting its release to try to understand how they reached such different conclusions from ours on the question of outdoor coverage.
Recall that we found, in a random sample, that we succeeded in achieving a connection in 31 of 53 tested locations, a rate of 58%. Further, we calculated the probability that that rate of failures would occur by chance if MetroFi was meeting the 90% coverage standard at about 2 in a billion. In contrast, Uptown Services reported in its Executive Summary that MetroFi provided outdoor coverage in 95% of the POC area.
Having had a chance to look over the Uptown Services report, it looks like there is a plausible model to explain the discrepancy. Here it is:
- MetroFi tells the City of Portland that they should expect a connection if the received signal strength is -79 dBm or greater based on some testing MetroFi did (City Project Manager Logan Kleier: “MetroFi has found that -79 dBm is the minimum necessary signal strength to achieve a 1 Mbps modulation rate based on the utilization of a 30 mW wireless client, such as an Intel 2915ABG, in non-line of sight conditions at 300 feet from an access point.”)
- The City of Portland tells Uptown Services that they should use the -79 dBm received signal strength as a surrogate for a “connection”.
- Uptown Services does their drive testing with a Proxim Orinoco Gold 60 mW radio and a 5.5 dBi roof-mounted omni-directional antenna.
- Uptown Services performs their proprietary analysis, which involves creating a grid of 100-foot squares, averaging the received signal strength values found within the squares, and then counting the proportion of squares within 500 feet of an access point with an average signal strength of -79 dBm or greater, and finds that about 95% of them do. Since the contractual standard is 90%, Uptown Services finds that MetroFi passes that standard.
There are several problems here:
- The ability to get a connection is largely determined by the transmit power and antenna gain of the client device. This is because network communication requires two-way communication, both that the client hears the access point and the access point hears the client. The access point is loud (a 400 mW or more transmit power and a 7.5 dBi antenna), very near the maximum allowed by the FCC. Client devices can hear the access point from potentially great distances. The limiting factor is whether the access point can hear the client device from those great distances.
- The original Unwire Portland RFP (Sections 2.2.1.2 and 2.2.1.5) indicates that the network should support coverage for common client devices, builtin as well as plugin PCMCIA and USB radios. These typically have 30 mW radios and low-gain antennas (2.2 dBi or less).
- It is not at all clear that the MetroFi-supplied -79 dBm received signal level is relevant to these common client devices.
- Logan Kleier claims that the Intel 2915ABG radio is a 30 mW device, but it is not clear that the FCC disclosures agree (see page 6 of 91). There are values reported there than imply that the peak transmit power is as high as 250 mW. If true, that would amount to a discrepancy of 9 dB in MetroFi’s favor.
- The City of Portland relies on the -79 dBm received signal level without, apparently, verifying it in any way. There is no indication in the Uptown Services report that they tried to verify it. Logan has not indicated that the City has verified it.
- Uptown Services performs their drive testing using a radio with a 5.5 dBi antenna gain. Most client devices do not have such a high gain antenna. Compared to a typical client device, it is at least 3 dB optimistic. Therefore, even if the MetroFi -79 dBm standard is accurate, the cut point that Uptown Services should have used to compensate for their antenna should have been no lower than -76 dBm. Unfortunately, the level of detail necessary for a reader to compensate for this is not available in the Uptown Services report.
- It is not clear from the report (at least as of my initial reading) how the 100-foot square grid cells were aligned, and how much of the cell needed to be within 500 feet in order to “count” in the calculation.
Another item of note, page 13 of the Uptown Services report indicates that the MetroFi network failed the extended availability test, providing a connection in a fixed location for only 91% of the time over the course of a month-long test, less than the 99% required.
As Caleb and I, and perhaps you dear reader, are able to examine the Uptown Services report more closely in the coming days, additional notable issues may be discovered.
MetroFi Receives Rubber Stamp
Posted by Caleb Phillips on 11 April 2007We just heard that Uptown Services has finished their report, and provided it to the city. In sum, their report gives the MetroFi network a passing grade, which has convinced the city to apparently simultaneously issue a certificate of acceptance to MetroFi based on the recommendation of project manager, Logan Kleier. Although we have not seen the full report from Uptown, we have a few comments on the rationale for acceptence. The bulk of the results from Uptown generally agree with our results. The results for network availibility, for instance, match closely with ours. The one clear exception is coverage. Mr. Kleier reports:
Uptown services data show that over 95% of outdoor coverage areas receieve a -79 dBm signal or greater. According to internal MetroFi data, -79 dBm is the minimum signal strength threshold necessary to connect to a MetroFi access point at 1 Mbps modulation rate. This exceeds the minimum RFP metric of 90% coverage in outdoor areas of the proof of concept.
There are a few problems with this statement. We were surprised to read the value -79 dBm, which was not documented in any RFP or contract that we are aware of. Further, the value of -79 dBm, without being qualified by a description of client hardware, or statistical demonstration that this correlates with the required 64 Kbps upstream and 64 Kbps downstream connection, is completely meaningless. The original RFP clearly indicates in Section 2.2.1.5, that the intention is to provide connections to lowest common denominator devices. At best, signal strength is half of the needed information to estimate connectivity coverage. Our methodology, in contrast, measured the ability to acheive a connection. Lastly, to use a value provided by MetroFi to test the MetroFi network, and to trust it blindly, is clearly not independent.
At this point, the MetroFi network has been rubber-stamped and will proceed forward. We are disappointed that the city chose to approve a network which has garnered much public skepticism immediately, and without an opportunity for peer-review or public comment. At best, this seems to indicate a substantial lack of due-dilligence. We look forward to studying the full report, and hope that it includes a clear description of Uptown’s testing methodologies and their collected data. We intend to finish our report, which is nearing completion, and will publish it here as soon as it’s complete.
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