Columbia Law School's Tim Wu (my second reference to Wu in two days) has this piece in Slate today that sums up how free municipal Wi-Fi plans have cratered. He blames the failure of this once-hot notion on the fact that so many cities approached the job as a public-private partnership instead of investing the funds needed to commit to full-fledged public works projects.
By 2005, it became clear that major cities didn't really want to build out Wi-Fi networks as public works projects. Instead, places like Philadelphia and San Francisco announced "private/public" partnerships. That meant giving a private company the right to build a wireless network and try to make money off of it. Often, this simply meant giving a company like Earthlink the rights to install Wi-Fi devices on street lamps and charge citizens for access. The cities then washed their hands of the issue of success or failure.
The result in most areas is a telecom "Bay of Pigs," where "the government wanted [it] to happen but left [it] to underqualified private parties to deliver." Yes, that's right. Few cities have funds in the coffers to take on a costly communications project without help.
And Wi-Fi is costly, in large part because the technology, built to be hyper-local, is an operational and deployment nightmare when scaled up to big geographic areas. Wu downplays the inappropriateness of Wi-Fi for cities by noting that college campuses, which can be pretty darned big, have Wi-Fi everywhere.
Some observers blame these failures on Wi-Fi's technical limits. Wi-Fi does have serious limitations, but wireless Internet technology has worked well even on large college campuses.
But college campuses are typically circumscribed areas and university Wi-Fi networks are supported through parents' tuition, fees, grants and endowments. Cities, by their very nature, are huge, complex and diverse places (University of Pennsylvania occupies only a tiny portion of the city of Philadelphia, for example, and is an homogenous, centrally-run section in the middle of a jumbled and diverse urban landscape) and typically rely on taxes to support services.
There's no comparison between a university and a city-wide communications network. Otherwise, Wu is right. Private companies such as EarthLink can't build a Wi-Fi system unless they charge for service, and most such city-authorized Wi-Fi services stink in comparison to cable and DSL.
In typical configurations, municipal wireless connections are slower, not dramatically cheaper, and by their nature less reliable than existing Internet services.
These facts, as Wu notes, "have put muni Wi-Fi in the same deathtrap that drowned every other company that peddled a new Net access scheme."
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:53 PM|Comments(0)
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