Cities reconsidering Wi-Fi coverage

It is always nice to be right. And so I patted myself on the back today after reading a story by Judy Keen, in USA Today,Cities turning off plans for Wi-Fi. that said Wi-Fi as a city service is running into roadblocks and many municipalities are having second thoughts.

Here’s the first two graphs.

“CHICAGO — Plans to blanket cities across the nation with low-cost or free wireless Internet access are being delayed or abandoned because they are proving to be too costly and complicated.

Houston, San Francisco, Chicago and other cities are putting proposed Wi-Fi net-works on hold.”

This is something I predicted a long time ago:

November 1, 2002, Coffee, Black, no Wi-Fi

Public wireless in a death spiral August 15, 2003.

And on April 30,2004 Wireless hot spots in critical condition .

There’s even more but why bore you with the details.

The point is the that as predicted Wi-Fi roll outs require far too many players for each player to get a piece of the revenue pie that makes it cost effective for them to participate.

The only way it will work is if the municipality in question paid for everything. But alas, Wi-Fi which promises to eliminate the digital divide between the haves–those with broadband access–and the have nots–those without–does not have the same clout as a baseball or football stadium.

Plenty of cities are more than willing to pay for that.

WiMAX is a possible solution in that less infrastructure is required and it does run on an IP network, but I doubt the big WiMAX players, Intel and Sprint for example, will be willing to give away anything at this point, unless maybe like a sports stadium, they will get to name the network. So, instead of Wi-Fi coverage users will have to say something like, “I use I-Fi,” aka the Intel Network. Just a thought.

The other more likely solution is 3G data cards in laptops and 3G smart phones, both of which are here in terms of client devices and infrastructure.

I’m just not sure if cellular providers are willing to help eliminate the digital divide or at least pay as much lip service to it as the politicians and the Wi-Fi providers did.

Nevertheless the fact is that fees for data are continuing to drop and smart phones are getting more and more powerful. So in a few years we won’t need Wi-Fi or even a laptop unless it sits on our office desk.

Of course, Wi-Fi will always have a place as a tremendous point solution for connectivity, but if we are talking about horizontal broadband, cellular will win out.