On Friday, Earthlink announced that it was done with the municipal Wi-Fi business, marking yet another blast of hot air leaking out of the muni Wi-Fi bubble. Wi-Fi guru Glenn Fleishman hit the nail on the head when he told the Seattle PI that “Big city Wi-Fi is dead.”
The technical and commercial realities of huge Wi-Fi rollouts across big cities were never going to live up to politicians’ promises, so it’s not a huge surprise to see Earthlink, a major player in these rollouts, give up. As Glenn notes, smaller-scale deployments are still working, but only under the right conditions — which don’t exist more often than not.
The fundamental issue here remains that Wi-Fi, as a technology, is ill-suited to this sort of wide-area rollout. But there could still a bright future for both municipal broadband and municipal wireless. Local governments have a wide array of useful applications for muni wireless, though they aren’t as sexy to voters as the promise of free citywide internet access. Clearwire, for instance, has partnered with at least one city on a muni WiMAX network, which could offer more utility and benefits than a muni Wi-Fi one. Watch this space, as localities look to get the technology right, and partners emerge to support them.
Carlo
In theory WiMAX should help… but it suffers from one of the same problems that WiFi does. In its first incarnations, it operates at 2.5GHz, which has lousy indoor penetration unless there’s a really dense network of transmitter sites.
So Metro Wireless is only really useful for outdoor-only applications - typically worthy-but-dull municipal stuff like parking meters, pollution monitors, CCTV and so on. Plus maybe a few people in parks with laptops in places where the weather’s good & there’s not much crime…
I still think the muni-wireless emperor has no clothes, even if WiMAX is his new tailor.
Dean Bubley
Thanks for the comment, Dean — I think you’re making a good point. I completely agree that the dull uses of muni wireless are generally the most valuable ones for local governments, with public/free/low-cost internet access coming way down the list.