Yet another city-wide WiFi plan has bitten the dust.
AT&T informed St. Louis city officials it was pulling the plug on a planned free wireless Internet access plan that was supposed to roll out over the next two years. AT&T high cited costs and technical issues as the main reasons the plan failed.
The refrain sounded familiar. St. Louis joins Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and others who have had ambitious WiFi plans quashed by high costs and technical gotchas. Chicago killed off an $18.5 million Internet access system in August citing rising costs, spotty demand and uncooperative carriers – Earthlink and AT&T -- as the main reasons for the cancellation.
Another sticky issue in Chicago and other municipalities is that the primary carriers reportedly demanded that Chicago become an “anchor tenant,” paying an annual fee to use the WiFi network to support city services. When the city refused — and insisted that the system attached to city street lights and lamp poles be built, maintained and operated at the contractor’s “sole expense” the whole system came crashing down. Anchorage, Alaska and Corona, California have discontinued their municipal wireless projects after MetroFi, the private industry partner in both cities, said it could not offer free service without a commitment from each municipality to be an "anchor tenant" on the system.
In St. Louis, AT&T and city officials spent 18 months negotiating before reaching a deal in February to connect the city's 62 square miles over the next two years, according to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. AT&T was to provide free wireless Internet service to anyone for 20 hours a month, then charge for more or higher speeds. Aside from giving access to light poles, there was no cost to the city, though it planned to spend about $400,000 a year to buy access to a special public-service network it would use for police and other city services.
But in the months since the deal was signed, AT&T engineers wrestled with a thorny problem: they couldn't find a cost-effective way to get power to the network of transmitters — likely 50 per square mile — that would carry the signal, the Post-Dispatch story said. Originally, they planned to mount them on the city's 51,000 streetlights, but most of those get no power during the day. They tried Ameren's utility poles, but most of those are in alleys, and the transmitters need a straight line of sight to send Internet to a computer. They looked at stoplights and the sides of buildings, even attaching a battery pack to each transmitter, but couldn't make it work, the Post-Dispatch said.
Municipal WiFi isn’t totally dead. Philadelphia, for example, is well on its way to becoming one of the world's biggest Wi-Fi hot spots . Network World recently reported that Philadelphia gave EarthLink the green light to cover the 135-square-mile city with a wireless mesh network by year-end.
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The cities expect too much from the vendors
I'm interested in the comment about Chicago refusing to become an anchor tenant for the WiFi network it wanted in the city. How can a city expect the full financial burden to be on the service provider, and then not even guarantee that the city itself would be a paying user?
I've written before about the death of Houston's planned WiFi network. In this case, the vendor (Earthlink) pulled out because the project was not economically feasible. But at least the city of Houston did commit to contract millions of dollars worth of services to ensure that Earthlink had at least one good customer.
Shame on Chicago council representatives for expecting something for nothing. While we all would like to get "free" WiFi service, you don't get something for nothing.
Linda Musthaler
Principal Analyst, Essential Solutions