October 2nd, 2007
The summer that Muni Wi-Fi died
Speaking of Tim Wu, the good professor has written an intriguing piece for Slate subtitled Why Municipal Wireless Networks Have Been Such a Flop.
Wu says it’s not that public wireless is a bad idea. Rather, cities have screwed up by refusing to treat Internet like a public utility. Cities have no problem with paying for sewers or roads but when it comes to Wi-Fi, politicians were happy to smoke crack and believe that Earthlink would pay for the whole thing.
That illusion has run straight into the ancient economics of infrastructure and natural monopoly. The bottom line: City dwellers won’t be able to get high-quality wireless Internet access for free. If they want it, collectively, they’ll have to pay for it.
Wu points out that the problem with delivering Internet is the “last-mile problem” — the bottleneck tightly controlled by telcos and cable companies. It’s a problem the market has failed to address.
I remember going to industry trade shows where grown men demonstrated robots designed to crawl through city sewers and deliver a fiber-optic cable to your toilet. (That firm, CityNet, received $375 million in funding and actually wired the sewers of Albuquerque, N.M.) …. While both the FCC and paid industry analysts have continually predicted an “explosion” in broadband over power lines, its current market share is approximately 0.008 percent.
Enter Muni Wi-Fi. Cities would use the genius of Wi-Fi to deliver Internet across dozens of square miles.
By 2005, it became clear that major cities didn’t really want to build out Wi-Fi networks as public works projects. Instead, places like Philadelphia and San Francisco announced “private/public” partnerships. That meant giving a private company the right to build a wireless network and try to make money off of it. Often, this simply meant giving a company like Earthlink the rights to install Wi-Fi devices on street lamps and charge citizens for access. The cities then washed their hands of the issue of success or failure.
While Wi-Fi does have technical limitations, technology wasn’t the problem, Wu says. The problem was economics.
Today, the limited success stories come from towns that have actually treated Wi-Fi as a public calling. St. Cloud, Fla., a town of 28,000, has an entirely free wireless network. Cities like St. Cloud understand the concept of a public service: something that’s free, or near-free, like the local swimming pool. Most cities have been too busy dreaming of free pipes to notice that their approach is hopelessly flawed.
Bottom line, so to speak? If you want leave public access to the private sector, the system will be bottlenecked or incomplete. True public-private ventures mean both sides need to pony up.
Real public infrastructure costs real public money. We already know that, in the real world, if you’re not willing to invest in infrastructure, you get what we have: crumbling airports, collapsing bridges, and broken levees. Why did we think that the wireless Internet would be any different?
