Sunday, April 09, 2006

 

What is driving Municipal WiFi?

San Francisco becomes the fourth major city that will have WiFi powered by Earthlink. A report in the NY Times notes that Earthlink and Google have jointly won the bid to provide WiFi, with Google managing the free 300Kbps service and Earthlink offering a complementary 1Mbps service for $20 per month. Earthlink is already behind the WiFi service going into Philadelphia, Anaheim and Milpitas (in Silicon Valley) while Google is managing a service in another Bay area suburb, Mountain View.

There are lots of questions that come to mind:
  • Should these efforts really be called municipal networks or are cities actually annointing winners in a commercial race?
  • Is any or all of this hype being driven by a Motorola / Intel conspiracy to sell more gear?
  • What is the proper role for cities and government in the WiFi space?
  • Are we creating the next generation of local franchise rights, similar to the cable TV goldrush of the last generation?
  • Is there room for facilities-based competition or is community WiFi a natural monopoly?
Community broadband initiatives are continuing to be a hot topic and Toronto Hydro Telecom is the largest Canadian player, as we wrote a month ago, and when we compared it to Philadelphia's deal.

There will be more talked about this subject at The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit when we explore Community Broadband Networks in a special session on June 12.

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Posted by Mark Goldberg @ 4/09/2006 12:38:00 AM
Comments:
The answers to most of these questions are fairly obvious. With only 3 channels in B mode, public or municipal wifi has to be a monopoly, and interference is still challenging in urban environments from other wifi, bluetooth, cordless phones, etc. Is this the next gold rush - I doubt it. Muni wifi will never equal cable or dsl speeds, and it will never have full mobility. Is there really a need for muni wifi? - It probably has a place as a best efforts service in areas with a lot of transient or outdoor activity - around hotels, convention centers, pedestrian malls, transportation hubs. But it is not a great standalone universal network due to interference, lack of vehicular mobility, backhaul costs due to small cell size, and lack of traditional mobile voice service.
Posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 7:51 PM, April 15, 2006
 
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