Absolutely Free

Well, it's now official: there will be no free wireless Internet access for the city of St. Louis. Originally conceived as a city-wide service, municipal Wi-Fi (wide-are wireless service) will now be confined to a downtown-only “pilot project”.

In the technology business, “pilot project” is often a euphemism for “consolation prize” - although in this case it might just be a realistic alternative for the near term. Condo developments are sprouting like dandelions in downtown St. Louis right now (see the Urban St. Louis site for some examples ), so a municipal Wi-Fi network there might actually be profitable.

There's no need to go into the gory details behind the failure of the original plan as they're available on line, although it is rather surprising that it took so long for somebody to notice that there's no power running to city street lights in the daytime - thereby killing the plan to mount Wi-Fi antennas on them. Anyone who has spent any time in the city after dark has surely noticed that lights go on or off in blocks rather than individually.

St. Louisans need not feel stigmatized by the evaporation of this particular techno-mirage, though. As The Economist magazine noted in an August 30th article, “many municipal Wi-Fi projects have since been hit by mounting costs, poor coverage and weak demand”. Chicago has killed its muni Wi-Fi project, as has Springfield (IL) and even San Francisco. Meanwhile, existing networks, from Tempe (AZ) to Taipei, have failed to fully live up to expectations.

Some of the problems are technological. The outdoor transmitters don't generally have the power to penetrate walls effectively, or examples, so indoor coverage is spotty. But the main barriers to the spread of municipal Wi-Fi networks appear to be economic.

Building the basic infrastructure that would provide seamless, wireless Internet access is expensive. A 2005 Jupiter Research paper estimated that price at $150,000 per square mile. An October 27th, 2007, article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch estimated the cost at closer to $200,000. Even in a relatively small geographic area like the city of St. Louis (62 square miles), that's a lot of money invested up front with no real guarantee of a profitable return.

One solution, as municipal WiFi advocate Esme Vos suggests in a recent interview, might be for cities to provide the basic network access infrastructure - the wireless transmitters and related back-end hardware and software - in much the same way they now provide physical infrastructure such as roads and sewer systems. They could open up these networks to the Internet service providers, who would sell the actual Internet access to subscribers just as they do now over existing telephone lines. Cities could pay for the network investment via a combination of taxes and payments from the Internet carriers.

This might also have the advantage of making the hurdles lower for ISPs who might want to sell to the folks connecting to the municipal network. As Vos points out, this is what has happened in “Nordic countries” where this “socalist” approach has actually resulted in more consumer choice than here in the USA, where our options are usually limited to either the cable monopoly or the telecom monopoly.

That's because free-for-all capitalism tends to devolve into a small group of non-competing monopolies. But that, I suppose, is another blog post.