Whatever happened to municipal WiFi?

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Whatever happened to municipal WiFi?

Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | Municipal Wi-Fi |

Ars Technica - Muni WiFi flop a bad omen for FCC’s free wireless plan:

New York City, New Orleans, Portland, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Washington D.C., Boston all moved to seed wireless clouds. Earthlink, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Earthlink and a gaggle of corporate boosters joined the crusade. By Summer 2006, a law review article pronounced the issue decided: “Citywide WiFi as a public service is no longer a bureaucratic pipe dream, but has the backing of America’s technological titans.”

Today the muni WiFi experiment is a shambles. The Philadelphia system was abandoned by Earthlink in June, and sold for scrap. It never performed as promised, and served fewer than 6,000 subscribers out of a population of 1.6 million. It had promised to serve tens of thousands of low-income households; the final tally of such users: 902. Those who did sign-up for $6.95 per month found slow speeds and spotty coverage. Alas, even tech-savvy early adopters eager to sip lattés while browsing via broadband were disappointed. On some occasion, it is possible that a connection strong enough to Google search results for “digital divide” was maintained, but that was likely as close as Philadelphia’s vaunted network got to impacting it.

Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago—all have gone bust. New York City, early on the bandwagon, got bogged down in politics, and now has simply given up. “We don’t think municipal WiFi will succeed,” offers a city official.

2 Comments to Whatever happened to municipal WiFi?

Rory Conaway
February 15, 2009

Municipal WiFi would have owned the market and made the FCC’s plan moot if it had been executed correctly. Metro-Fi and Earthlink screwed that up with poorly designed implementations based on ridiculous business plans. However, our company, along with many others sat back, waited until they got out of the way, and are now implementing a new Muni-Wireless 2.0 design that costs 1/10 as much and delivers better performance.

Triad has proven it’s possible to deploy Municipal WiFi for $3000-$6000 per square mile instead of the ridiculous $100K-$150K numbers used before. By utilizing a better RF engineered design along with common sense expectations for clients, a carrier class product can be delivered to the end user. In addition, cities can now afford to give police, fire, and utilities a real high-bandwidth everywhere.

It’s silly that cities abandoned a technology that was proven technically, just marketed and delivered incorrectly. Hopefully they will start coming around as more of these types of deployments are installed.

Will
March 23, 2009

Over here in the UK, seems everyone now has a mobile broadband contract which gets around the coverage problem. Also means that the local government doesn’t have to spend serious cash on installing their own system probably won’t work anyway. Because of the competition between providers, you can get it for only £5 a month now! Crazy business.