If you visit Chicago and you want public Wi-Fi access, you’d better go to Starbucks. Once hailed as one of the pioneers of the citywide municipal Wi-Fi movement, Chicago reevaluated its original $18.5 million plan, citing market conditions, and will redeploy the project in the next year or two. On the heels of Chicago’s announcement, Philadelphia and New York have also reported problems getting their Wi-Fi programs off the ground. In fact, MuniWireless.com has downgraded its growth estimates for the industry from 108 percent to 35 percent. One cited reason is the difficulty of making wireless providers live up to the pricing promises the local government has made to its citizens.
Municipal wireless has become a political football,says Craig Mathias, a Wi-Fi expert at market research firm Farpoint Group. City governments have put a lot of constraints on vendors, in some cases requesting free access for every citizen.
One element that may have kept city residents away is how the pricing model was devised. For most cities, access is free at a very low bandwidth (often 500 kilobits per second). Then you pay a monthly fee for higher bandwidth, which subsidizes lower-income residents. Many residents already have home networks with faster connections and newer technologies, such as 802.11n.
But there is one emerging technology that could salvage municipal wireless: WiMAX. It’s a more robust technology that covers a larger area with relatively few towers, as opposed to the hundreds of access points municipal Wi-Fi requires. (Mountain View, California, has about 380 of them.) Analysts say WiMAX is coming, but there have been no successful rollouts in the U.S. yet, so costs are an unknown. Greg Goldman, CEO of Wireless Philadelphia, is not convinced that WiMAX is ready for prime time. WiMAX will encounter the same obstacles and challenges as Wi-Fi in a dense urban environment, he says. It’s still extremely new and is, today, cost-prohibitive.
Meanwhile, as the United States waits for WiMAX to achieve mass adoption, a few cities have already made good on the Wi-Fi promise. In Minneapolis, U.S. Networks built a public-safety network (with the city as a primary customer) and a public-access network covering 60 square miles. In August, when the I-35 bridge collapse killed seven people, cell service went AWOL, but Wi-Fi kept working. Nevertheless, signal reaches only about a third of the city and can be weak. It appears that even the cities that are ahead of the Wi-Fi game still have a long way to go
