Personal Telco Project members in essence shitcan the current state of MetroFi’s intermittently-available and ad-driven municipal wifi network. So what does MetroFi do? Issues a statement (pdf) questioning PTP’s motives and expertise.
“[C]ity-wide network assessment,” it reads in part, “is significantly more complex than local hotspot testing.”
But, really, the PTP test was a fairly straightforward one: Can a person use the network? The answer, far too frequently, was no. And there’s nothing all that terribly complex about testing precisely what the end user needs to be able to do.
In general, that’s what the PTP test did. It selected a random set of nodes on MetroFi’s network and tested to see if someone could use them.
In reality, that’s the only test that actually matters. Whatever else MetroFi thinks needs to be tested, no one on the ground is going to care about anything other than whether or not they can access the damned thing.
MetroFi’s response to the news that people can’t access the damned thing is pretty typical as responses go, if you’re someone who has fucked up and gotten caught at it.
That response is known as Attack the Messenger.
Addendum: It should be noted that technically the tests were not conducted by PTP as an organization. Or, in the words of that post, the testing “was not directly associated” with PTP. But the tests were conducted by members of PTP.
The usable-coverage based on random sample is actually only about 1/3 of our full set of tests. We’ve tested just about everything required by the original testing IRFP. I have no problem with MetroFi questioning my (and Russell’s) qualifications (in fact, I hope they are just as healthily skeptical about our qualifications as we are of their network), but I think it’d be wise of them to at least survey our methodologies before casting judgement. Since they know literally nothing about us or our test at this point, it is clear that this press release was motivated primarily by either ignorance or slander. We’ve asked that MetroFi release a correction for at least the factual errors - I’m not sure how that will turn out…