Recently in Municipal Networking Category
Over on GigaOm, Worldwide Lexicon founder Brian McConnell has blogged about the reasons why municipal Wi-Fi has been an astounding disaster, and what can be done to fix it.
He's half right.
McConnell correctly notes that one of the biggest problems was that Wi-Fi advocates completely misunderstood who used public Wi-Fi. He notes that "muni W-Fi proponents have misunderstood how the Internet is used in public spaces, primarily by assuming that people who can afford laptops are somehow unable to afford Internet access."
That's one of the reasons. You can also add lack of planning, poor reception, technical obstacals, abysmal security and the "somebody else will pay for all this" mentality that seems to follow these projects, but I won't quibble.
McConnel then goes on, however, to state that the problem of serving the poor and minority could be handled by giving anyone who can't afford broadband a cell phone data plan and a data-enabled cell phone. McConnel elegantly puts it this way:
"It seems reasonable to me to require mobile operators -- as a condition for siting cell towers throughout a community -- to provide basic service to users who can't afford it."
Pardon me for saying this, but I think most municipal governments would chew off their arms rather than give up a sheckel of the loot they extort from the cell phone companies for the right to build towers. They are unlikely to give up the loot in particular to help poor people get cell phones. Still and all...
McConnell should get high marks for a good idea. He begins with the premise that public-private partnerships could be a good idea in the cell phone market, and that expanded use of data on cell phones would be helpful to some poor people. He even takes the tech community to task -- rightly, IMHO -- for its arrogance:
"Most of us who read this site take communication for granted, and frankly, have a warped view of what people outside the tech industry need. Talk to a tradesperson or someone who falls under the category of the "working poor" and you'll get a much different view of what's important (things like an affordable place to live, basic services, the means to find work and get things done)."
But McConnell's idea suffers from the same major flaw as arguments for municipal Wi-Fi. It's based on wishful thinking, not on data. McConnell must know that even poor families already have cell phones, and that plans exist to help them with "lifeline" services. Likewise, I don't think that the problem is that people can't get reasonably-priced plans for mobile communication, even if they involve pre-paid phones.
The problem remains literacy, and computer literacy. All the infrastructure in the world won't help if Johnny can't read. And that's the crushing problem that is holding back the national adoption of broadband, more than any other single factor. Not deployment. Not cost. Not competition.
Literacy.
McConnell is on the right track -- public private partnerships, helping poor people become economically independent, and helping them to upgrade to better plans as they can afford them. He should be encouraged to take the next steps to flesh out his ideas with more and better data.
And if they are thinking clearly, the mobile communication companies will help fund that effort.
You can add Hometown Utilicom in Kutztown, PA, to the list of failed municipal networking ventures. Though the cable TV and Internet service did manage to eke out an operating profit of $80,000 for the first time last year, it could only pay about 25% of its annual costs for capital improvements and debt payments on a $2.18 million loan from 2001. Subsidies funneled into the project from the municipal electric utility have not been enough to offset the costs of the project, and the borough council has approved an additional $1.3 million to keep Hometown Utilicom going. That's a total of more than $8 million in debt since 1999.
Like most of these lunatic projects, the Kutztown venture was entered into with little understanding of the marketplace, nothing even close to resembling a business plan, and little thought to the complexities involved. Now the borough is stuck with a classic white elephant they can neither afford to feed nor easily get rid of.
I don't blame blame the people of Kutztown or its borough council. They were prodded into this bad decision by the idiotic panderers of municipal networking and their henchmen in the left-leading media. Why we continue to let these people spout their mantra of government-owned media is a mystery to me, but it's clear that anyone pushing the municipal networking agenda today is behaving irresponsibly.
Other cities and towns would do well to heed the failure rates.
Four years, hundreds of business plans, millions of dollars and thousands of pages of rhetoric later, it's clear that the idea of using Wi-Fi to blanket hundreds of square miles for broadband may not be the best idea mankind has ever had. But before we move on to better technologies and business plans, it may be helpful to clear the air on some of the lingering issues and bad feelings.
Here's my list of 5 things that need to be noted:
Wi-Fi is an excellent technology for the last 30 feet, but a lousy one for the last mile. It doesn't penetrate concrete, trees, distances beyond 30 feet or much of anything else well. Need proof? Just call tech support for any Wi-Fi router manufacturer and ask them what the reliable range of their product is.
The business plans for municipal Wi-Fi projects were nearly all garbage. They were filled with unrealistic expectations, irrational promises, hopes, dreams and exuberance. What they lacked were realistic budgets, market assessments, evidence of existing consumer demand and a sound business justification for building the network in the first place.
The news media was a major factor in the failure to recognize that municipal Wi-Fi is a bad idea. The many city newspapers, bloggers and trade magazines who breathlessly extolled the virtues of municipal Wi-Fi with an amazing lack of business experience, technical acumen or even common sense helped to fuel the bubble and mislead otherwise well-intentioned city leaders. Shame on them.
The telephone and cable companies are the heroes in all this, not the villains. While much fun was had bashing these companies and assigning t them all manner of nefarious motives, they were just about the only ones who had the experience to see that these networks wouldn't work as advertised. And the only ones who understood that using tax dollars to fund "white elephant" networks was a bad deal for consumers. Sadly, most of the self-styled consumer advocates did a lousy job of standing up for consumers in this matter.
When all was said and done, we are still left with what clear thinkers (including myself) had to say from the outset: that Wi-Fi has significant technical, security and business issues that would prevent it from being a suitable medium for widespread broadband deployment. By the way, the clear thinkers were the ones viciously attacked as being "sock puppets." They deserved better then, and do now.
I live in the rural farmlands at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where broadband is hard to come by. I wish with all my heart and soul that there was a free, high-speed service that could solve my broadband woes. But wishing won't make it so, any more than it did for Philadelphia, San Francisco or anywhere else.
