Back in the olden days of Wi-Fi -- say, four years ago -- it looked as though free wireless Internet access would be a certainty, a municipal utility provided to citizens like water or electricity, only this time at no charge. But the promise of free Wi-Fi, like the dream of adorning every city with moving sidewalks, never materialized, and now looks as though it never will.
The New York Times had an update on the big Wi-Fi flop over the weekend.
Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, Chicago and more than a dozen other cities and towns have all seen their ambitious plans for free wireless access stall at the starting block. In most cases, the numbers simply didn't add up. The growing realization that municipal wireless ventures would not be close to profitable has led to the withdrawal by service provider EarthLink, the leader in the free Wi-Fi effort.
Following EarthLink's withdrawal, officials in Chicago, Houston, Miami and San Francisco have all tabled their wireless projects, perhaps for good. Slate's Tim Wu wrote a good explainer about the failures of civic wi-fi last year.
Cost overruns were part of the problem. Covering a large city with a reliable wireless network turned out to require many more routers than predicted, which significantly raised the cost of building the networks and kept potential investors and subscribers away.
Small public Wi-Fi projects do continue, however. The city of Kingsport, Va., is moving ahead with a three-year plan to offer free Wi-Fi throughout the community. A local credit union will foot the bill.
In the meantime, in most major cites thousands of free wireless hotspots have popped up in local coffee shops, restaurants, and libraries, making the construction of an expensive city-wide Wi-Fi system seem less urgent, and even irrelevant.
In a way, free municipal Wi-fi has been undone by the very force it sought to unleash -- the decentralization of authority and the return of the commons. City Hall, it turns out, is no match for the local Starbucks when it comes to connecting people.
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