While playing around with my brand new Nokia 770, I walked out on the balcony of my 17th floor apartment in San Francisco’s financial district, and tried to connect to my home network. What do I find in the connection manager? A signal from something called SF Tech Connect.
SF TechConnect is the much ballyhooed project in San Francisco, which Google is bidding for. I know that the city has been very hush-hush about this whole network bidding process, and hasn’t offered any answers to at least one tax payer - Kimo Crossman, who has moved heaven and earth. His lone crusade to get more transparency hasn’t gone anywhere. Local media like San Francisco Bay Guardian have been critical of the whole process. This is giving some nay-sayers to come in and say, well do we need this network?
(Jackson West predicted this mess, by the way!) But that brings me back to the whole issue of the SF-TechConnect on my Nokia 770. If the city is asking for RFP’s, then how the hell am I picking up signals? Is this someone else simply using the SSID. Folks, it might be time for some war-chalking. Anyone interested? Drop me a note… I will pay for coffee.
5 comments so far
7:09 AM PT
Om, Have you tried the minisip client for the 770?
http://www.minisip.org/
Its only beta, but given your interests … and I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to hear how SIP and the 770 work together.
Regards
9:52 AM PT
When in SF last week I got a good laugh out of all the “google” SSID’s…
12:02 PM PT
17th Floor Buddies
Wow. Living on the 17th floor in San Francisco is a true delight. Now I learn I share the same floor (but not the same building) with Om Malik Om made quite a discovery this weekend while stepping out on…
5:11 PM PT
MetroFi now has access points at San Francisco’s Civic Center, Ferry Building and Portsmouth Square. Using the network requires visiting a splash screen and accepting a ToS.
Macworld reports the system uses both 802.11b and 802.11g and creates a mesh between nodes using 802.11a. These access points are connected via a 36 Mbps wireless line-of-sight connection to Mount Davidson and city-owned fiber.
1:49 AM PT
[...] Om Malik : ยป SF TechConnect Already Live in Financial District? Couldn’t repeat the experiment, but still, intriguing. (tags: wireless) [...]
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