Muni-WiFi: The dream is all but dead

Alas, Muni-WiFi, we hardly knew ye. Once an idealistic dream to bring affordable broadband access to citizens in major metropolitan areas, it appears that all of the showcase deployments have suddenly come to a screeching halt. Chicago has put the brakes on their deployment, Muni-WiFi provider EarthLink is hemorrhaging money and today there's word that San Francisco's free WiFi project is officially kaput. This, my friends, could well be the end of large-scale Muni-WiFi deployments in America.

The problem with Muni-WiFi is one that lies at the heart of any large-scale deployment of technology for the use of the general public. Muni-WiFi was never quite a philanthropic project and it was never quite a corporate deployment either. It tried to straddle the lines between public and private, government and corporate and altruism and the pursuit profit. Local governments wanted Muni-WiFi networks for their citizens and for their own internal use--the only problem was the ridiculously high cost of deployment.

The solution to this problem, or so local governments thought, was to bring in the big vendors, have them fight over the contract and then let them take a cut of whatever profit there was to be had. Essentially, these local governments expected private companies to swallow the bulk of the costs for massive public works projects--in exchange, they would get to charge subscription fees or serve advertising over the network.

Now, that sounds like a good idea in theory but it turned out to be a disaster in practice. By attempting to use a cost/profit splitting model with private enterprises, cities like Chicago and San Francisco basically engineered a tug-of-war, ensuring that none of the Muni-WiFi networks ever made it past the drawing board. EarthLink and AT&T wanted Chicago to pay for use of the network that they would build but the city refused. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the terms of the city's contract with EarthLink became a political issue, eventually becoming so contentious that few politicians dared to touch it.

Muni-WiFi is especially frustrating because we all know that the technology is here--and has been for a few years now--it's simply a matter of working out the economics and politics of it. To call Muni-WiFi a complete failure is, admittedly, a bit reductionist, as a number of smaller towns have managed to deploy networks to varying degrees of success. Still, in large metropolitan areas like Chicago and San Francisco, Municipal WiFi may never work--unless either a government or private company decides to take the initiative (not to mention the huge financial risk) and simply build a network themselves. Until then, there's always WiMAX. -Mehan

P.S. We won't be publishing DailyTechRag on Monday, due to my personal policy of avoiding labor in all of its forms during the Labor Day holiday. See you on Tuesday.