20 years seems like a long commitment to any particular technology.
In 1989, token ring (a LAN technology backed by IBM) was a viable alternative to Ethernet. If a particularly info-highway-smitten municipality had made a 20-year deal with IBM to have token ring networking installed in all new buildings, they would have been kicking themselves for the past 15 years...
I have to complain, I've ridden BART in San Francisco for three years and had no idea I could have signed up for wifi. I wish I'd noticed the network on my phone and looked into it, but of course looking for wifi on BART never occurred to me (to save battery life I have "search for networks" turned off). I ride the train almost every day and I've never seen a notice at a station about the network. If only 16,000 people of several million in the BART service area signed up, then apparently tens or hundreds of thousands of wifi-enabled commuters never heard of this either.
And now they'll be expected to pay as much per month for a daily hour of the Internet as they do for constant access at work and home.
As a layperson, the only reasons I can see for BART to set such a high price point are a misunderstanding about the economics or a desire to keep usage at a low, manageable level.
I suspect I should be glad that there's wifi at all, at any price, but frankly $30 a month makes this "public service" a toy for highly paid commuters rather than an intensely useful public tool for all the area's travelers. I hope against hope that the daily and hourly fees aren't high enough to remind me of AOL-by-the-hour. To think we've reached a point where the privately owned cafes give away wireless, and the publicly owned transit charges for it.
$30 a month makes this "public service" a toy for highly paid commuters
I don't think you have to be that highly paid at all for this to make a whole lot of sense. 30 minutes a workday is 10 hours a month, minimum, spent on rapid transit. That time is lost to you unless you have some way to make use of it -- and the Internet for time-shifting either productive labor or errands makes a whole lot of sense.
I have roughly 4 hours of daily commute (yay, Japan) and would give my spleen to have sustained connectivity (and room to open a laptop). It would give me essentially two workweeks for free -- and believe me, I'd put them to use.
The difference of magnitude between the revenue of the proposed wifi charges and the revenue of BART ticket prices is so staggering that a comparison makes little sense. It's much more likely that money could be taken from another area of costs than that the cost of wifi would affect ticket prices.
I'm not saying the money will appear out of nowhere, but it's certainly not staggering if the current charge structure is expected to create a profit for the company that installed the network.
This raises so many doubts.
As with numerous other comments to the original SF Chronicle article, I am outraged at the idea that one more WIFI service area thinks I should be subscribing for $30/ month or so. Right :/
Furthermore: who decided to sign a 10-year contract? The supervising Board for BART must have been blinded by its drool over a cash cow to help fund its operations. Did it not occur to them that it's likely rates will be coming down because of increased competition & new technologies within even 5 years?
Of course 16,000 signed up for free. Let's form a pool to bet how long it'll take to get that number of paid subscribers.
The day pass for wifi is $10? I think by 2011 (date set to be completed), a lot of people will be on mobile data plans and it won't really be worth it to pay for internet on a 30 min ride.
Which line are you riding on? I take BART from Dublin/Pleasanton to New Montgomery every day and the only time I lose my signal is through the Lake Merrit tunnel and Transbay Tube.
I mainly commute between the city and Berkeley. The signal obviously goes dead in the transbay, but it's been pretty spotty in the above-ground parts, too.
In 1989, token ring (a LAN technology backed by IBM) was a viable alternative to Ethernet. If a particularly info-highway-smitten municipality had made a 20-year deal with IBM to have token ring networking installed in all new buildings, they would have been kicking themselves for the past 15 years...