Les Jones

Free Municipal Wifi in San Francisco

Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 | Municipal Wi-Fi |

S.F. Mayor Sees Wireless Service as Basic Right

“This is inevitable — Wi-Fi. It is long overdue,” [San Francsico Mayor Ganiv] Newsom told a news conference at San Francisco’s City Hall. “It is to me a fundamental right to have access universally to information,” he said.

The city was going to provide the service for free anyway, but Google came in with the low bid of zero.

There was a mania a decade ago for free Internet access, with lots of high-minded arguments made to support the idea. It made no sense to me even then during dot-com fever. Telephone service is clearly more fundamental than Internet service, and no one was claiming telephone service should be free. And if free access to information is a basic human right, what about access to free water and sewer service? Today most of those community freenets are either defunct or effectively defunct because broadband Internet made them obsolete.

Slightly different arguments can be made for free municipal wireless. Essentially, there’s no way to bill for it, so it has to be provided by the city if universal coverage is the goal. When the cost is spread across all taxpayers, the cost may be relatively small, and in dense urban areas it may work well. The argument then becomes whether universal urban coverage is a worthwhile goal that taxpayers are willing to pay for.

It’s possible that the case can be made for municipal wifi as a city service. For instance, one could argue that it’s not a utility, but rather a distributed benefit, like street lights or landscaping. In San Francisco, Google is footing the bill for now, but time will tell if municipal wifi fares any better than freenets.

UPDATE: Nashville is considering municipal wifi.

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