Whatever Happened To….. City Wide WiFi

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.

Why Wi-Fi Networks Are Floundering