Municipal Broadband Internet Moving Forward

With Earthlink pulling out of San Francisco's public Wi-Fi Internet project, the City of Chicago abandoning its own Wi-Fi plan, and other such announcements in the last few weeks, some commentators were quick to declare the idea of municipal Wi-Fi dead. However, others quickly emphasized that other municipal Wi-Fi plans were moving forward.

• Philadelphia, a pioneer on the issue, is moving forward on deploying its system.
• Minneapolis is moving ahead as well.
• Portland continues to expand the reach of its existing Wi-Fi network.
• In fact, there are towns and cities across the country with already functioning Wi-Fi services.

Recent stories of municipal Internet failure are based more on the deep financial problems of private sector partner Earthlink, which suddenly began backing out of earlier hyped commitments. The reality is that the recent projects that are backtracking were sold as a bit of a free lunch-- with no cost to the cities involved and little cost to users, a bit of a dot-com hype at the local level. But cities and towns with clear plans for using wireless to serve concrete community needs have seen obvious benefits from their projects.

In Minneapolis, for example, the project centered on helping integrate communication among public safety and city agencies, with the city agreeing to be an "anchor tenant" paying $1.25 million a year for the city's own use of the network. And the network proved its value when the Minneapolis bridge collapsed in August. With cellular services overloaded within 30 minutes of the collapse, the Wi-Fi network opened up the subscription-based service to all residents, federal officials, and others needing to use smartphones and laptops to communicate with each other. 

Limits of Wi-Fi and New Fiber Optic Networks: The reality is that Wi-Fi technology has limits, given its short range and its trouble extending service inside many buildings, but municipal Wi-Fi networks can play a real role in improving community members lives, especially as cell phones like Apple's iPhone are increasingly equipped with Wi-Fi capability. And given the failure of the federal government to invest serious money in upgrading our national broadband infrastructure, Wi-Fi networks are pioneering models for local communities to take the next step in combining Wi-Fi with investments in higher-speed fiber networks to create more complete local broadband networks. 

One-upping its Twin City partner, for example, the St. Paul City Council this week voted to seek partners for a fiber-optic high speed municipal network, which residents think will take $200 million in investments by partners including the city, public schools, the local county, and the state. Looking to build local fiber-optic networking is an increasing trend among cities looking to serve their residents and give their local industries a leg-up in international economic competitiveness.