The Trouble With Municipal Wifi

Tim Wu explains why municipal wifi projects are flopping all over the place. In essence, the idea it's never really been tried. Or, rather, the cities doing muni wifi haven't done what they ought to try to do and make wireless broadband internet a freely available public service. Instead, not wanting to invest any money in their wifi network, they tried to contract with private firms who would build networks that the companies would then charge people for.

This hasn't worked very well, and it's also contrary to the whole underlying purpose of the enterprise which was to make wireless broadband internet access into a freely available public service.

I'm not 100 percent sure the public service model would be a great idea, or under what circumstances it'd be a great idea, but we have all sorts of different towns and cities here in the United States and it sure would be nice to see someplace try this out in a real way.

Comments

FWIW - I was in Middletown, CT a couple months ago taking my brother to a visit at Wesleyan University, and they have a very nice free municipal network, which I discovered accidentally while working outside in a park.

Posted by Pete | September 28, 2007 12:53 PM

There are a few cities in the SF Bay Area that already have wi-fi. Santa Rosa and Petaluma already have it in their downtown areas, and I think Sebastapol might also. More info here:
http://sonic.net/wifi/

Seems like muni wi fi is pretty easy to do in smaller cities. Bigger cities, not so much.

Posted by pinson | September 28, 2007 1:12 PM

Same here at Dartmouth; our wireless network services at least some of the local area outside of the college, and they're now working on splitting the wifi into secure and public networks.

Posted by Max | September 28, 2007 1:12 PM

The reason I can see do to this is that the airwaves are a limited resource, the belong to the people, so why turn over a monopoly to some corporation. On the other hand, it should be metered, not free, so people pay for what they use and it covers its own costs. Otherwise you are forcing one person to subsidize another, and you are guaranteeing lousy service, since there is no incentive (like increased revenue) for building out the network.

Posted by Alan | September 28, 2007 1:14 PM

The big telecoms (now down to 2) have been lobbying fiercely for 3 years now for a federal law that would make it illegal for municipalities to offer Internet access on a public utility model.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | September 28, 2007 1:16 PM

This may be a very stupid question, but I know nothing about internet infrastructure.

Are we going to kick ourselves 10 years for putting up municipal wifi? That is, will advances in technology leave us with municipalities stuck with decrepit, slow, and out of date municipal wifi systems?

I'm asking honestly, I really don't know how this works.

Posted by Patrick | September 28, 2007 1:22 PM

Unless city governments are delivering every other service perfectly, I really see no reason to get into wifi. Internet access seems like something the private sector can handle just fine.

Posted by too many steves | September 28, 2007 1:28 PM

There are lots of examples of muni wifi in the US and they do tend to be in small to mid-sized cities or cities where the utilities are municipally owned. It works and like any other public service the local rate-payers support upgrading the system.

And yes, the issue is, "How well does this scale up?" Lafayette, La., sure, it works well, Philiadelphia, via contractors, maybe not so much.

Posted by Sharon | September 28, 2007 1:32 PM

In Tempe, a supposedly progressive University town, they gave a monopoly to a company to provide "free" wi-fi in the downtown area.

What is "free wi-fi?" It's free access if you want to get to the city's webpages, if you want to visit any other site, you need to pay.

WTF?

Posted by feh | September 28, 2007 2:36 PM

Near Hood River Valley, OR, there is a massive, free public WiFi network. Providing internet service is cheap through WiFi, but transactions costs for billing and keeping nonsubs off the network are quite high. There seems to be a pretty strong rationale for free public provision in this case.

Posted by cure | September 28, 2007 2:41 PM

I am glad to hear so many positive comments on wifi. It does work. THe model needs to be refined. Maybe "free" needs to be changed to "really cheap".

I get so tired of hearing the doom and gloom about muni wifi. I have to ask myself what would have our world have been like if the voices of doom and gloom were heard when the airplane, car, and tv first came out? People love to jump on the band wagon of doom. Its so much fun to tear down and easy as well. Why not build things up and work to imporve the world?

Posted by Eric | September 28, 2007 2:58 PM

I spent a few months over the past few years working in Athens, GA. There the city installed a free muni wifi cloud over the old downtown area as a redevelopment project. The result was a resurgent downtown.

Had they attempted to blanket the entire city with wifi, downtown would still be on the skids as there's no reason to relocate from the perimeter to downtown unless there's some benefit from the move.

Posted by travel wise | September 28, 2007 3:19 PM

Isn't the logical thing to develop the WiMax technology. I think that's the battle going on in Seoul, and it seems the better approach to something as broad as a municipality.

Posted by nolaboyd | September 28, 2007 3:26 PM

Actually, only one sentence in the article that pretty much nails why it isn't:

In typical configurations, municipal wireless connections are slower, not dramatically cheaper, and by their nature less reliable than existing Internet services.

Tim Wu downplays the technical limitations, but they're 90% of the game. If you're going to provide internet access as a municiple service, you'd probably to take advantage of the fact that eminent domain and control of public lands and roads makes it easier for the gov't to put in the kind of long term fixed infrastruture that wired services use. Wireless actually lends itself to private delivery compared to cable and DSL - it's a lot easier to put in two wireless routers that cover a set of houses than two sets of cable or phone lines. The absence of succesful private systems suggests WiFi just isn't a good layer in the infrastructure to deliver the service at.

1) Despite being a "public service" it serves only a relatively small band of the population in most areas, namely those with wireless computer hardware. This is a relatively small and wealthy segment of the population. Offering it for free would be an unwarranted subsidy to an already well-to-do segment of society.

2) It's a radio signal and consequently limited in penetration and fidelity by solid structures and inclimate weather.

3) Off-the-shelf routers are poorly suited both in terms of security options and range.

4) Not all devices play well with all types of wireless security.

5) The muni goverment would have the technical ability to track all your interent traffic based on your MAC addresses if they so chose.

6) Physical access to a router normally allows you to have your way with it pretty easily and if you can have your way with the router, you can more or less have your way with anything that connects to it. Having a bunch of routers scattered all over the place is difficult to secure. Not to say it isn't doable, but it is more challenging that securing personal or institutional wireless or wired networks.

7) You have to turn over more of your infrastructure when the technology advances. You don't have to install wires in people's homes, but a wire doesn't need to be replaced to increase the speed that data can be transmitted, whereas a wireless router does.

8) Individual investments in equipment to recieve the signal will be greater and more often. New, faster wireless standards require new reciever cards for each device to utilize and come out frequently whereas the standards for the various methods of physically connecting a modem to a computer or a router to a computer tend to be cheaper and stabler.

9) Access to your computer (by other people, and if they get to it, you too) is contingent on how well designed and enforced the muni gov'ts security policies are.

Posted by MattXIV | September 28, 2007 4:21 PM

Nobody ever considers the health risk of emerging technologies.

When we exploded the first A-Bomb, half the scientists working on the project were convinced we were going to ignite the atmosphere and perhaps destroy the majority of our country's infrastructure... yet they tested it anyway.

There are widespread reports of people becoming ill in the UK where wifi is considerably more accessible in municipalities. Cell phones and their towers cause tumors in people with constant exposure. WiFi systems reportedly cause severe migranes, disorientation and nausea in some people... of course companies have paid good money to make sure the research on the cancer risk of WiFi and cell phones remain inconclusive.

Posted by Nicholas | September 28, 2007 5:36 PM

Will municipal wi-fi's allow access to all websites or will politically unpopular ones be "filtered" out? Do we really want governments to be providing most of the access to the Internet?

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 28, 2007 5:47 PM

Steve Sailer,

Did you have a chance to read this L.A. Times article?: Does affirmative action hurt minorities? It's encouraging that this was even published in a mainstream paper.

Posted by Dave | September 28, 2007 5:55 PM

Thanks. Affirmative action is particularly questionable for law schools because it can lead to young black people of above average intelligence wasting up to a decade of their life, first spending three years in law school, then living a twilight existence for years working day jobs while studying for the bar exam at night, yet never ultimately pass. According to Richard Sander's data, 53% of the black students who enter law school never become lawyers, versus only 24% of white students.

These are people who could have gotten started on remunerative careers at age 22 when they graduated from college if they had resisted the siren call of law school. But there is a massive effort to recruit marginally qualified blacks into law school, which makes the people who run law schools feel good about themselves, but damages the lives of a lot of black young people.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 28, 2007 6:22 PM

Mountain View, CA has townwide free Wi-Fi supplied by Google (our most famous employer). Actually, I think they pay the city ~$100k/yr to rent the streetlight poles, etc.

The cost to Google is reputed to be $1-2 million. The benefit to Google is some advertising (you need to access through their homepage) and some experience in implementing mesh wireless.

Whether a few million is a good deal for a municipality to spend on a public good is another issue.

Posted by M. Peachbush | September 28, 2007 7:10 PM