Is municipal Wi-Fi a technical failure or a business failure?

The cities and service providers behind the Wi-Fi deployments completely misunderstand the potential user base.

By Maury Wright, Editorial Director -- EDN, 9/27/2007

I was a bit surprised recently to find the tech-centric article "Cities turning off plans for Wi-Fi" on the front page of a USA Today. That article echoed a number of other reports in the tech media about problems with municipal Wi-Fi projects. For instance, communication analyst Andrew Seybold has covered the topic in numerous blog posts and recently devoted an issue of his Commentary e-newsletter to the topic. The consensus seems to be that deploying Wi-Fi in a mesh network that covers a significant amount of urban area is just too complex. But read between the lines, and you’ll find that the message is that no one will pay for the service.

Wi-Fi certainly has technical limitations in a mesh deployment. The 2.4-GHz flavors have only three nonoverlapping channels. And as I’ve written repeatedly, Wi-Fi implementations don’t come close to their specified range. But those technical issues aren’t really behind the failure of municipal-Wi-Fi deployments. What is the problem? The cities and service providers behind the deployments completely misunderstand the potential user base.

Service providers targeting municipal Wi-Fi clearly expected to compete for customers with DSL (digital-subscriber-line) and cable-Internet service. And there is no way to deploy a wireless network that can compete costwise with the wired services when the wired infrastructure is already in place and paid for. Certainly, the urban areas targeted for municipal Wi-Fi are well-wired.

The potential user base for municipal Wi-Fi ranges from students to professionals that are on the move between meetings, classes, and other events. These users don’t need municipal Wi-Fi as a primary Internet service but rather as a secondary, supplemental service.

The problem is that a number of Internet alternatives exist to buying a municipal-Wi-Fi subscription. Both the GSM (global-system-for-mobile)-communication and CDMA (code-division/multiple-access) camps are touting their cellular-based offerings. But Wi-Fi is also prevalent. In McDonalds and Starbucks, Wi-Fi is almost universally available.

EDN's IT organization has struck a deal with a coalition of Internet-service providers, and I can access service from most of the Wi-Fi service providers that operate in restaurants, bookstores, airports, and hotels. The service industry has now matured so that a user can buy a single subscription and get service in almost any urban area. If a municipal service were to succeed, it would require the operator to join such a coalition of service providers. The only exception that I see would be a city that simply wanted to serve citizens and businesses by footing the service bill. And, as the earlier-referenced articles mention, cities are unwilling to do so.

In the future, WiMax may be a better technical choice for high-speed urban wireless access than either Wi-Fi or the data-centric cellular offerings. But wide availability of truly usable WiMax-equipped notebook PCs is fairly far in the future if for no other reasons than power-consumption issues and lack off battery life. Last year, I tried the CDMA-centric EVDO (evolution-data-optimized) service but wasn’t enthralled with the performance. For now, I’ll stick with the broadly available Wi-Fi services at restaurants and other businesses. The number of businesses offering such services grows daily.

Alas, the few municipal-Wi-Fi deployments that are operating reveal usability issues, as well. In a blog post in March, EDN Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert wrote of some benchmark tests he ran with cellular connections and with the Google municipal deployment in the San Francisco Bay area. I don’t know whether the Google Wi-Fi has improved of late, but, for any municipal Wi-Fi service to succeed, it had better match the experience that the almost-ubiquitous wired coffee house offers.

Contact me at mgwright@edn.com.