IP Democracy: Muni Wi-Fi is Such a Pain

Business Week has this piece about the problems with municpal Wi-Fi networks, and boy can I relate. EarthLink has premised a good chunk of its growth strategy on building Wi-Fi networks for cities and is learning the hard way that the technology doesn’t always work over wide spaces.

Get too far away from the transmitters and you’re out of luck. Go into a building with thick walls and the signals just can’t through. If too many people are on the network, the speeds drop to below dial-up levels. Most of the time muni-Wi-Fi is a Rube Goldberg proposition and, to make matters worse, even when everything is working well, customers aren’t flocking to it.

The question is whether municipal Wi-Fi will ever pay off, or if this grand plan to offer broadband to the masses is headed for the dustbin of history.

EarthLink has managed to garner only 2,000 subscribers in the five cities where it has launched its “Feather” Wi-Fi service. It’s no wonder, then, that EarthLink is cutting back on its muni-Wi-Fi spending.

From my own experience, virtually every time I’ve tried to connect to a city-provided Wi-Fi network, the connections have been a bust. Maybe Wi-Fi, never designed to be anything other than a hyper-local form of wireless Internet access, is just not the best technology to deploy across wide geographic areas.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 11, 2007 10:38 AM to IP Democracy