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GCN Home > 09/18/06 issue

Cities make financial sense of WiFi projects

Municipalities try to build their business plans around wireless access

By David Essex, Special to GCN

There was something so darned utopian about the whole idea: Bypass the powerful telco companies, string up some IEEE 802.11 wireless access points and give citizens free or substantially subsidized Internet access. And to be sure, there are plenty of city-sponsored hot spots around the country where, if you happen to be within WiFi range, you can log on free of charge.

But cities got ambitious, and municipal WiFi projects turned into crusades for universal broadband, or improved government service or economic development. Hot spots weren’t enough, and plans were drawn up for wireless mesh networks that spanned many square miles. And on paper, muni WiFi sounds great. The million-dollar question is who will pay for it. As one systems integrator involved in many high-profile muni WiFi deployments told GCN, “2006 is the year of the business plan.”

Muni WiFi networks have their share of skeptics. Many say they compete unfairly with private service providers and don’t offer demonstrable gain to taxpayers—even from the point of view of economic development, which is notoriously hard to quantify.

“I think there are dubious claims that have yet to be backed up by any real, hard data,” said Steven Titch, senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free-market think tank.

But nagging doubts have so far been unable to stop a slew of towns and cities from pioneering ubiquitous wireless Internet access.

Reasons aplenty

Public WiFi projects are often justified by a grocery list of benefits that entail a wide range of risks as well as rewards.

The lowest-hanging fruit may be the greater mobility that WiFi offers government workers, especially police, firefighters and public utility workers. In addition, savings are generated by the use of cheaper radios and lower labor costs resulting from improved communications coverage and reliability that reduce unnecessary travel.

“You can underwrite a large portion of the network based on that alone,” said Craig Settles, president of Oakland, Calif.-based consulting firm Successful.com.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Mobile & Wireless, State & Local, Web Strategies



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