Should WiFi Be Public Infrastructure?

I never liked living in Philly too much. I went to business school there in the mid-80s.

I spent most of my time in NYC hanging out with the Gotham Gal and getting into the venture business as a part-time associate at a firm called Euclid Partners.

But now Philly is doing something that I really like. They are going to turn the whole inner city into a WiFi Hotspot. Presumably it would be free. That's smart, really smart.

According to Technology Futurist and cNet, the cost is about $10 million initially and about $1.5 million per year to maintain it.

That's because WiFi equipment is cheap and getting cheaper every day. If the amortized cost of the upfront expense is about $2-3 million per year, then the total annual cost is about $4 million per year.

There were 1.5 million people in Philly in the 2000 census. So for about $2.67 per person per year, everyone can have free WiFi in the City of Brotherly Love. I bet that the city can figure out how to make this work without taxing its citizens. The sponsorship opportunities alone should make this a profitable venture.

I hope they do it and it works. Because I'd like all cities to do this. I think WiFi should be public infrastructure like roads, bridges, and tunnels.

Comments

[Thomas Lockney]

Portland, OR, where my wife and I are moving next year, is doing something very similar: http://www.joejava.com/wirelessasgood.htm

[chris holland]

hermosa beach, where i live, launched its free wifi on august 11th.

i rambled about it on my blog. I think it's very exciting. WiFi has the possibility to offer a new backbone for communications and media, with VoIP, video-conferencing , online radios, video streams. For virtually low-to-no-cost, any resident could start a broadband TV station. Local News! Block News! Or a high-quality radio station. Basically all the things that are now emerging over the Internet but are often impractical or of low-quality because of bandwidth/latency restrictions ... taken to a whole new level on a *local* high-bandwidth network. It's crazy.

The fact that wifi enables a city to connect its users to the Internet at large is indeed a cool thing. What I find cooler is the local, "mini-super-fast-internet" it creates, and the way it could progressively grow in coverage, potentially connecting multiple cities together.

[Ben Casnocha]

Fred - On July 7th I posted "Cities, Not Companies, Must Run Hotspots": http://bigben.blogs.com/first/2004/07/cities_not_comp.html

FYI.

[jackson]

Tony Alva, Chris, and myself werer discussing WiFi, and how it's current development will/could benefit us, and we're looking foreward to the day when Tony can sit in his back yard with a laptop, mic, and guitar, and record tracks for common projects in real time with us. It's very exciting, very soon it won't just be Barbara Streisand who can afford to hear mixes and do vocal takes in real time from her house in Malibu, while her studio is 3000 miles away in New York.

[robertk@evdo-coverage.com]

Yes... also... http://www.wireless-internet-broadband-service.com talks about tools for Cloning your office...

[Aidan Quinne]

"I totally dissagree. Wifi has been around long enough for other
technologies to beat it's speed, reception, and security by miles...
litterally... EVDO is the newest wireless protocol that gets you about
25MILES radius of reception from every cell tower... just like cell phone
reception. I found a really clear comparison of pros and cons of all sorts
of WIFI vs EVDO vs DSL an more at
href="http://wireless-internet-broadband-options.com">http://wireless-intern
et-broadband-options.com and href="http://wireless-internet-broadband-service.com">http://wireless-intern
et-broadband-service.com"

Aidan Quinne

http://wireless-internet-broadband-options.com

evdo.coverage@gmail.com

[Aidan Quinne]

"I totally dissagree. Wifi has been around long enough for other
technologies to beat it's speed, reception, and security by miles...
litterally... EVDO is the newest wireless protocol that gets you about
25MILES radius of reception from every cell tower... just like cell phone
reception. I found a really clear comparison of pros and cons of all sorts
of WIFI vs EVDO vs DSL an more at
[url]http://wireless-internet-broadband-options.com[/url] and
[url]http://wireless-internet-broadband-service.com[/url]

Aidan Quinne

http://wireless-internet-broadband-options.com

evdo.coverage@gmail.com

[chris wireless internet fowler]

I like the idea of free internet through a city, problem lies with when the person leaves the city, then does the conection switch to the next service, this is when the evdo card is worth its weight in gold. check it out at our site. http://www.wireless- internet-broadband-service.com