Photo of Lompoc by coolcaesar from the ciy's Wikipedia entry
The arrival of cheap Wi-Fi prompted thousands of towns and cities to imagine how easy it would be -- and how useful -- to offer networking as part of the local infrastructure. Local residents would love it if they had free Wi-Fi access and it would be a boon for businesses. And firms queued up to install and run systems.
Almost everything was right about all this, except for the economics. Some of the companies that thought they'd make money out of municipal Wi-Fi are finding it harder than they expected. BusinessWeek gives a good example in an article, Why Wi-Fi Networks Are Floundering:
Take Lompoc, Calif., population 42,000. The city deployed its 11.3-square-mile Wi-Fi network last September, at a cost of more than $2 million so far. Today the network brags of just 442 users. Though Mayor Dick DeWees hopes to reach 1,000 users by year-end, the network needs 4,000 paying customers just to cover its annual operating costs. In Lompoc's case, the city is wealthy enough to absorb the expense for several years to fund a project it deems a public good. But companies are bound to be less patient.
In the early days, suppliers competed to build Wi-Fi networks free, and would kick back a percentage of their subscription and advertising income. Now, cities have to pay to get deals. "The days of a service provider coming in without a city commitment are over," asserts Pelosi of MetroFi.
One of the problems, which suppliers should have recognised at the start, is that Wi-Fi generally isn't good enough to provide home broadband services worth paying for. Plenty of people have problems with walls and so on, even when they have their own Wi-Fi systems.
Of course, all those problems should be solved by the arrival of WiMax, which we've been writing about for four years now. See this Guardian article, for example: Wireless broadband will soon be everywhere, says Bill Pechey. It just isn't clear which version we will use
I'm still optimistic about WiMax, but that's probably because I've never used it. I'm still far from convinced that copper is dead, that we'll never install fibre, and that we're all going to go unwired. What do you think?
