Then Google found out that when the street lights turn off, there's no power to run the access points. So it just walked away.
Uh? Duh! What did they expect? A switch in every street light? (Which also would need to be controlled in some way ...)
I would also like to point out that most cities have a utility electrical grid to power traffic lights and the like. While I imaging some south cities could get away with solar-powered traffic lights, it's unlikely that Chicago is one.
I don't know anything about this Google+Chicago experience (even though I currently work at Google), but I would bet the issue was not as simple as "they found out that street lights turn off".
Google has been operating free WiFi in India at 400+ locations since 2016 and claim they've got a 8 million userbase [0].
> ...but I would bet the issue was not as simple as "they found out that street lights turn off".
I'd be very surprised if this was true. It seems more plausible to me that news.yc has anti-Google bias.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation...
And how much bias you see depends on where you are on the spectrum. You naturally tend to see the unbiased opinion as closer to your own POV.
It's surprising that you first speak about claims with very little proof and then continue to blatantly make one yourself.
I've seen videos of people who'd rather not have a light on outside their bedroom window at night setting up a laser pointer to point at the sensor to keep the light off.
In many locations they use light sensors, and if you live above a street oriented the right way you can see quite a cool effect of the lights going off sequentially down the street as the light goes below the threshold.
In other locations that I'm familiar with, they use a ripple relay, where a particular signal is transmitted over the power lines (a "ripple") in a way that doesn't affect unaware equipment, but signals the target equipment (relays on the supply to the streetlights) to switch. Similar technology is used to provide day/night rates where one circuit is only energised during off-peak hours.
I don't see any reason the ripple relay couldn't be bypassed to provide a second always-on feed for the Wi-Fi gear, but it might be that the ripple relays are not at every lamp post but instead at the substations or roadside cabinets, in which case there would indeed be some cost to run the extra circuits.
I ran into this same problem in a the first 3 municipalities around 15 years ago when we tried deploying a street light solution.
Just to offer a counter-point, in my experience it's often that they are managed in big groups, and individual control is uncommon.
Quite often at the right time you'll see big swathes of lights turning off, sections of neighbourhoods, as far as you can see down a reasonably straight road, etc.
From what I understand, it's usually just a timeswitch in the circuit breaker box at the side of the road.
At one point we came out with a slim line (low profile) design. When I asked why, they said that good ol' boys in Texas were riding in pickups and shooting the switches as a game. The low profile model was a harder target to hit. :-)
Or, solar panels..