The Highs and Lows of Municipal WiFi

There is a lot of demand for free municipal WiFi, but implementation problems persist, Stefan Weitz, director of planning for MSN at Microsoft, said in an address at the MuniWireless 2007: New England conference this week. Microsoft conducted several market studies in recent months in places like Portland, OR, Weitz said. The company is planning a more advanced user-testing market study in a 1,000-square-mile section of Oakland County, MI, which would evaluate the value of using advertising to support the costs of the system. This analysis comes on the heels of publicized problems with a MuniWiFi network in one city in central California. One year after Lompoc, CA launched its wireless network, only a few hundred subscribers have signed up--far fewer than the thousands that were expected.

Read more on Microsoft and MuniWiFi:
- see this ComputerWorld article