We’ve been writing excitedly about the WiFication of our cities since we painted this website purple but apart from the odd strip of river, we seem to be still forced to sit in cafes often having to pay ridiculous prices on WiFi airtime. Business Week have an article that looks into the reasons why we still don’t have municipal WiFi and apparently it’s all our fault:
The static crackling around municipal wireless networks is getting worse.
San Francisco Wi-Fi, perhaps the highest-profile project among the hundreds announced over the past few years, is in limbo. Milwaukee is delaying its plan to offer citywide wireless Internet access. The network build-out in Philadelphia, the trailblazer among major cities embracing wireless as a vital new form of municipal infrastructure, is progressing slower than expected.
These potholes in the nation’s wireless rollout of civic ambition—criticized by many as an improper use of tax dollars—are hardly the exception. For the road is getting bumpier for cities and the companies they have partnered with in a bid to blanket their streets with high-speed Internet access at little or no cost to users.
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My take on this is that the cities and the companies they are partnering with have done a poor job of marketing muni WiFi to the end users–us. Plus, many cities have jumped on the bandwagon without doing their due diligence, just wanting to feel the “coolness factor” of citywide wireless. What needs to happen is that local governments have to sign on as anchor tenants, streamline services, and then that alone will do a better job of showing the public the benefits of a wireless network. One can only hope…
August 16th, 2007 at 10:09 am