Municipalities Abandoning their Utopian Dreams of City-Wide Networks

Posted: September 4th, 2007 | 1 Comment »

A nice follow-up of an old post on the deployment of Minicipal WI-Fi (Metro-Scale WiFi Reality Check), the Economist covers in Reality bites the troubles that now local authorities and specialist firms such as EarthLink and MetroFi. I was mentioning the mismatch between on one hand the patchy network coverage and real-world connectivity issues due to physical, technological and economical constraints and the users’ expectations on the other hand. This now proves to be the root of the problem to force some cities to abandon their utopian dreams of city-wide networks. Real-world deployments finally reveal that Wi-Fi, which relies on outdoor radio transmitters, does not provide good access inside buildings, since it uses weak signals which do not always penetrate thick exterior walls. Proponents of the technology also underestimated the number of transmitters that would be needed to provide blanket coverage. Most networks deployed between 2004 and 2006 used between 20% and 100% more nodes than expected, which pushed up costs.

wifi scam
My free Wi-Fi experience in Toronto. So long for the utopia…

Relation to my thesis: When Embracing the Real World’s Messiness starts to make sense.

One Comment on “Municipalities Abandoning their Utopian Dreams of City-Wide Networks”

  1. 1 Cubitus said at 5:05 pm on September 6th, 2007:

    Well, have a look at what the City of Paris has done. It is operational. The main difference is that they did never try to cover the whole city but only well identified public places (libraries, parks, …) – I think that’s the right way of doing it. This way, the project is not very expensive, and it really makes sense.
    (In fact, it makes so much sense, that Orange, the incumbant operator in France, is trying to prevent them from continuing by attacking them in court.)