Why Muni Wireless Failed

Posted by: Stephen Wildstrom on November 18

Earthlink’s Nov. 16 announcement that it will “consider its strategic
alternatives for its municipal wireless business” means the end of what little hope was less for ubiquitous free or nearly so Wi-Fi service in U.S. cities. Some projects in progress, like on in Philadelphia, will continue but are unlikely to ever reach the scale envisioned by their boosters. And it’s unlikely that new ones will be started.

Unrealistic initial cost estimates and nasty politics played a role in the failure, particularly in San Francisco. But the fact is that Wi-Fi was simply the wrong technology choice and was doomed to fail from the beginning.

I’ve been a fan of Wi-Fi since before the technology had a name. It is a wonderful technology for distributing Internet service in defined and mostly enclosed spaces—homes, offices, hotels, campuses. But it’s an awful approach to wide-area networking.

There are a number of reasons for this. Individual Wi-Fi base stations are very cheap, but you need an awful lot of them to provide coverage to a big area, and the network that links them together gets fairly expensive. It's very hard to use access points mounted on utility poles to deliver service inside buildings, especially above the second or third floor of multistory buildings. Wi-Fi is great for computers, which are mostly used indoors and in one place; it's much less satisfactory for handheld mobile devices, in large part because the technology is not designed to handle rapid hand-offs as a user moves from one base station to another.

In many ways, the high-speed data networks being deployed by wireless phone carriers are more satisfactory, but they are considerably slower than Wi-Fi and much more expensive. The best alternative may be WiMax, which works as something of a cross between Wi-Fi and the phone networks. But Wi-Fi has problems of its own. The recent collapse of a WiMax joint venture between Sprint Nextel and Craig McCaw's Clearwire and increasing pressure by investors for Sprint to scale back its WiMax plans could badly damage hopes for widespread commercial service in 2008.

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