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Review by wallybass 
Posted: 3.7 years ago
member for 3.7 years, 15 visits, last login: 22 days ago
 Sunnyvale,Santa Clara,CA
 Contract price not specified.
 "Free"
 "Breaks browser bookmarking and other browser features"
 "MetroFi is a badly broken Internet experience"
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MetroFi - a badly broken Internet experience
Sunnyvale is one of the first cities in the country to have "free" (ad supported) WiFi Internet access on a citywide basis. I'm on a new segment of the Sunnyvale, CA, MetroFi network which is still in test mode. Since this portion of the network is still in a test mode associated with bringing it online, I won't comment on it's performance. (The potential is there -- it seems quite quick at times.)
MetroFi executives describe their service as the same as normal broadband "as long as users can accommodate a one inch ad bar atop each WEB page." That doesn't tell the story at all.
The big problem is that MetroFi advertising scheme all but completely "breaks" your browser's ability to bookmark pages, and it "breaks" other aspects of the browser as well. MetroFi ads are not like other WEB page ads. With other ads, the WEB page designer allocates space for the ads when he/she designs the page. MetroFi has the problem that it must "force fit" the ads onto pages already designed by others. Moreover, they must do that in the context of current browsers, and how they work. That severely limits their options - "parsing" each WEB page as it goes by, understanding the structure of the page's HTML (which may require understand arbitrary amounts of javascript as well), adding ads appropriately, and modifying the page's HTML before sending it on it's way is probably not a feasible approach.
So, MetroFi uses the existing HTML mechanism known as "frames." Roughly, the way MetroFi does ads is, for each page you reference they return a small "page" which redirects your browser to a "frames" HTML page on MetroFi servers. This frame definition page then "sucks in" (via HREF tags) MetroFi ads in the "one inch strip" "frame" atop the page, and also sucks in the original page that you asked for in another "frame," below the ads. As many people know, "frames" have serious shortcomings, and their use on the Internet has all but disappeared over time.
I use FireFox, and usually have lots of "tabs" active. Here are some of the ways in which the MetroFi "frames" mechanism destroys my Internet experience:
1. Because every page "points at" a MetroFi "frames" page, EVERY tab of my browser, ALWAYS, simply reads "Metro Fi." There is now no way to tell one tab from another.
2. As indicated, for every WEB page I view, MetroFi has redirected the browser to a "frames" page at MetroFi. So, when I bookmark, I'm bookmarking the "frames" page at MetroFi, not the page I wanted. It's true that the original URL is SOMETIMES appended (as an "argument") to the MetroFi URL, and, when that is true, I can edit the bookmark and trim the "MetroFi prefix" off of the front of the URL in order to get the original URL. But even that fails if I have followed any links within a given browser window (i.e., followed a link without using a new tab or new browser window), because the browser's URL doesn't change at all when I "follow" such a link when frames are in use (which, I think, is the reason that "frames" have all but been abandoned by most WEB sites).
3. After I bookmark a page, the initial bookmark title is always simply "Metro Fi," so there is no way to tell one bookmark from another. Bookmarks titles can be edited, but unless one does every time immediately after bookmarking, the result is chaos.
4. Ads are "pushed." MetroFi has decided that it is not enough to put an ad at the top of each page one time for each page you get. If you keep a page around for awhile, a javascript (or some other mechanism) decides that a new ad must be shown periodically. The general result is that no page is ever "done" loading, because their is always a new ad coming. While reloading ads, pages sometimes go blank and are then redrawn without warning while you are trying to read them. In FireFox, the little "loading" "icon" on the tabs shows many pages as (still) "loading," over and over again, even when you are not viewing them. Knowing when pages are in reality "done loading" becomes all but impossible.
The "pushing of ads" (point 4 above) seems particularly indicative of the mindset at MetroFi -- the implementation pushes "additional ads" at practically no real benefit in terms of real advertising effectiveness (at least for me, by far the majority of "pushed" ads occur on screens or windows which aren't even visible), but the mechanism uses (and wastes) considerable bandwidth and user computer resources (especially when a user keeps many pages open at once, the traffic starts to become quite sizable).
The message seems fairly clear: advertisers are really MetroFi's only "paying customers," and being able to tell advertisers that "xxx thousands of ads per day" are being "downloaded" (to heck with the reality that most these ads may not even be in visible windows) is what matters to MetroFi.
My take is that MetroFi has completely lost sight of their real customers (Internet users), and that things will remain this way until MetroFi advertisers figure it out, which may take years. Their Internet site is a model of a site which does everything in it's power to avoid exposing any path that might represent a communications path between MetroFi and it's non-advertiser user base. For that reason, I expect things to mostly go downhill from here.
Also, something to be concerned about with MetroFi is that, for all practical purposes, the MetroFi "Internet" is not the "end-to-end" "content-neutral" Internet that has spawned so much of the Internet's value in terms being a "freedom of communications" tool which has enhanced freedom worldwide. IMO, the service may very much run afoul of the new "Net Neutrality" bill being sponsored (early March, 2006) by Ron Wyden (Senate, Oregon, Democrat) which requires that "communications companies must treat all Internet content equally and will be prohibited from blocking, degrading or altering traffic." Traffic is not "unaltered" here, by any stretch of the imagination.
IMO, all of this makes the MetroFi network so unusable the it is rendered little more than "airways polluting junk mounted on city light poles." I think that cities are making a big mistake in allowing this to happen without looking more carefully at the result, and/or without having the insight or courage to be critical of the result and insist on something better.
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