Fast Cities Struggle to Go Wireless

Nearly 200 municipalities are planning to blanket their cities and counties with wireless networks, and since the technology first emerged about 10 years ago, over 150 of them have already cast a citywide wireless 'net or peppered their area with Wi-Fi hotspots.

But big ideas can mean big problems. It's still too early to tell how well these huge Wi-Fi networks will meet the lofty expectations of cities and vendors, especially when ballooning costs, weak indoor signals, and flawed business models could cause many planners to pull the plug.

These cities exemplify some of the major motivations behind citywide Wi-Fi:

PHILADELPHIA, PA: Philly became the first big-city pioneer of border-to-border Wi-Fi in 2004 when it proposed to connect all of its 135 square miles. After more than two years and much political strife, Atlanta-based Internet provider EarthLink has completed about 35 percent of the network, including free downtown hotspots.

The hallmark of Philadelphia's plan has always been hooking up a woefully disconnected city, in which about half of its 600,000 households have no Internet access, says Greg Goldman, CEO of nonprofit group Wireless Philadelphia.

Wireless Philadelphia was a key player in the network planning and now focuses on distributing bundles of laptops, training and paid-for Wi-Fi to the city's poor. Since sign-ups started in June, the group has distributed about 130 of those bundles, with the goal of getting out 1,000 by the end of the year.

ANAHEIM, CA: Relaxed politics and a market-based motivation made unwiring the home of Mickey Mouse and the Mighty Ducks a faster endeavor than in more political cities like Philadelphia. Anaheim leased its streetlights to EarthLink so it could build a network to compete with Time Warner cable, which the city continues to use as its main Internet provider, says the city's chief operating officer, Tom Woods. Now over half of the 50-square-mile city has Wi-Fi.

To city officials, who have done away with franchise fees, the deal is just a way of helping along the market. There is no free access zone, but competition should drive down the price of high-speed Internet in the area, so the story goes.

CORPUS CHRISTI, TX: Corpus Christi launched its 150-mile city-use-only network before most big cities even contemplated making Wi-Fi available to the public.

The first incarnation of the city's 150-mile Wi-Fi network was an automated meter reading system for utility gauges that the city built with contractor Northrop Grumman in 2004. Reading gas, water and electricity meters wirelessly offers the city efficiency equal to adding two full-time employees, says city Business Unit Manager Leonard Scott.

Now, the city uses about 40 different Wi-Fi applications, including ones that make building inspections faster, control traffic lights remotely, and give first responders access to patients' health records electronically.

Although 2,000 to 5,000 residents logged on each day during the building for free -- if patchy -- Wi-Fi, it was too taxing for the city to manage the network. EarthLink stepped in to buy and manage the system in March.

NEW ORLEANS, LA: In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, EarthLink agreed to build a free network over 20 square miles of the city for residents to connect to loved ones and for businesses to resume operations.

"It was key to the recovery effort of the rest of the city," says Anthony Jones, the city's interim chief technology officer.

The network used to be a little faster, but a pro-competition state law, backed by telecomm competitors, forces the city to operate its Wi-Fi at a modest 300 kilobytes per second now, a bit over five times faster than dial-up. The slowdown happened earlier this year when the Louisiana governor ended the state of emergency that had allowed New Orleans to skirt the law.

NO WIRES, NO PROBLEM?

Not quite. Breaking new ground means a lot of question marks for ambitious cities like fast-moving Philadelphia, as well as for the vendors that build the networks and the residents intended to use them. If the technology works, if the costs stay manageable, and if the residents subscribe, municipal Wi-Fi could be a pretty innovative, useful thing. But satisfying all of those conditions makes the concept of "muni-fi," well, iffy.

In most of the big markets, municipal Wi-Fi comes about as a public-private partnership where the city offers use of its utility poles to a private vendor that often builds, bankrolls and owns the network. Usually the city will lay out what it wants from the vendor and signs on as a customer itself; from there, it's up to the vendor to leverage its new real estate and collect profits through subscriptions.

But recouping that initial investment -- hopefully a couple times over -- has proven more difficult than expected.