Opinion: O Wi-Fi, where art thou?
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Remember last year when a flock of hipster towns were promising to provide free citywide wireless networks? Apparently financial issues have forced that idea out of fashion. From Sacramento and San Francisco to Houston and Chicago, Wi-Fi plans have been hitting snags or falling apart altogether.
That’s a shame, since total coveragein our high-tech age would be a pretty valuable service. Is there a way for cities to provide wireless coverage?
But, as Tim Wu of Slate.com points out,
The basic idea of offering Internet access as a public service is sound. The problem is that cities haven’t thought of the Internet as a form of public infrastructure that—like subway lines, sewers, or roads—must be paid for. Instead, cities have labored under the illusion that, somehow, everything could be built easily and for free by private parties. That illusion has run straight into the ancient economics of infrastructure and natural monopoly. The bottom line: City dwellers won’t be able to get high-quality wireless Internet access for free. If they want it, collectively, they’ll have to pay for it.
Establishing a citywide wireless hotspot is a matter of scale. Wu goes on to point out that Wi-Fi has succeeded not in high-tech metropolises, but in smaller municipal venues:
St. Cloud, Fla., a town of 28,000, has an entirely free wireless network. The network has its problems, such as dead spots, but also claims a 77 percent use rate among its citizens.
Business models and laws of scale aside, the San Francisco Chronicle says that clear purpose and tangible benefits also help:
The most popular uses that are motivating municipalities are public safety, remote worker access, meter reading and surveillance cameras. The city of Ripon (San Joaquin County) recently installed 71 Wi-Fi-enabled video cameras that allow police to monitor intersections and trouble spots remotely. Police officers using the city Wi-Fi network can pull up pictures from their cars and also broadcast live from cameras in their vehicles, allowing other officers to get a sense of what’s happening at a specific location. ‘What you’ll find is cities are now selling the networks on things that are quantifiable, like public safety or public works,’ said Craig Settles, a Wi-Fi consultant. ‘You’ve got to establish that before you can pursue other social goals.’
And apparently, in Minneapolis, the city’s public safety wireless network took pressure off cellular networks and made rescue efforts easier following the August bridge collapse.
So perhaps, in the near future, those cities will be able to build public-access service from existing networks like these. Before giving up on the muni-Wi-Fi dream, cities should consider models like these. According to the Chron, leaders in the Wi-Fi industry
are backing off some of the talk of broad public access and bridging the digital divide. The more immediate goals are concrete applications and services that can be sold to cities looking to go Wi-Fi. Despite the slowdown in the municipal Wi-Fi space, leaders say there is still a bright future ahead, especially with the introduction of new Wi-Fi-enabled devices such as the Apple iPhone. Metro-Fi CEO Chuck Haas said 6 percent of Metro-Fi users last month accessed the network through an iPhone. [...]
Here’s a thought: If you have an iPhone, you’re already on the right side of the digital divide, and you don’t need a city government to provide you with free wireless. Muni Wi-Fi was meant to be a public service; under this model, it becomes another way for private enterprise to benefit the privileged. Let’s hope that as plan Bs for municipal Wi-Fi evolve, cities remember why they took to this idea in the first place.