Back from the dead?

Municipal WiFi died in mid-2007 due to overinflated expectations, impossible city requirements, and the sheer limits of WiFi's capabilities. Or did it? Meraki, a startup born out of a mesh-networking project at MIT, thinks that $10,000 and two months' trial may change some cities' minds as they grow a network organically in San Francisco.

While it may seem that municipal networking was a flame-out if you read the coverage or lived in a city with service during the last round of muni WiFi hype, from the ashes grow new plants—as with most technology that eventually takes hold. New outdoor WiFi networks tend to be more modest in scope and more precise in purpose, while relying on later generations of hardware that cost less and work better.

Meraki has been holding on to the tail of this trend as municipal networking whipsawed about. The firm, partly funded by Google, believes it's riding a continued interest in deployments, all of them starting small and growing larger.

A survey of projects across the US seems to confirm this. Big networks for public access are out. Small networks, built cheaply, that grow organically in bits and pieces, are popping up all over. In parallel, some large public-safety networks, some of which abjure WiFi altogether, have sprung up across hundreds of square miles with no fanfare whatsoever.

Peer backwards at the origins of muni WiFi

Muni WiFi became a term of art after the mayors of Philadelphia and San Francisco independently declared their plans in late 2004 to have city-wide networks that would be largely or entirely free to residents, to try to overcome the so-called digital divide that separates those with computers and Internet access from those that don't.

These networks were of particular interest in cities with incumbent telecom and cable operators that hadn't yet invested in bringing broadband to a large swath of the town, focusing on suburbs or other cities instead.

Both mayors had to backtrack: free wasn't entirely practical given their budgets, and a quick backlash arose about taxpayer dollars being devoted to a purpose that might benefit those who could already afford to buy broadband. Stir in anxiety over competitive behavior by government entities that also may act as regulators (especially in the case of local cable franchise boards and cable Internet service), and you got a maelstrom. (Much has also been written—a fair amount by this reporter—about contemporaneous reports that antiregulation, industry-supported think tanks issued on the topic of competition, taxpayer funds, and allegedly similar projects that had allegedly failed.)

EarthLink and other firms stepped into the breach starting in 2005, offering to bear all risks and costs associated with building citywide networks, in return for charging fees or collecting advertising receipts. Cities still wrote contracts, however, and required build-outs that often said a winning bidder had to provide a usable signal to 95 percent of first-floor front rooms, not just outdoor seamless coverage.



EarthLink's Feather network was supposed to provide

WiFi in dozens of cities across America in 2007

After two years of build-outs, no large cities had completed networks, while complaints were plenty in most of the smaller towns in which service was rolled out in, part or whole. So-called winning bidders might have won the booby prize, winning the right to spend $5 million to $50 million per network.

It turns out—as many had predicted—WiFi isn't a good way to get the Internet into a home from the outside, although it seems to work reasonably well at covering outdoor areas for outdoor users. At the time, expensive WiFi bridges were needed to pull signals into a house or apartment. These bridges from PepWave and Ruckus Wireless cost $150 to $200 at the time for the cheapest model. They could pick up a signal from outside and rebroadcast it (acting like a WiFi client and access point at the same time), or pass it along inside over Ethernet or a second radio. A $20-per-month WiFi subscription that requires a $200 adapter (or a monthly lease fee) suddenly seems more expensive. A free, ad-supported account, likewise, is no longer precisely free.



Ruckus Wireless's dual-radio

MetroFlex bridge

The early estimates of the amount of gear required to offer good signal coverage per contracts appears to have been far below what was needed. In 2005, many firms were talking about putting 20 to 25 high-powered nodes per square mile. By 2007, the number was 40 to 50 in most areas.

Muni networks were also being built just a bit too long before the explosion in handhelds with WiFi. The iPhone was introduced in mid-2007, just as networks collapsed left and right, for instance, and WiFi-equipped BlackBerrys only started to ship in large quantities by late in the year. In cases where there was an overlap, such as the Nintendo DS, the WiFi devices didn't include browsers to allow authentication and payment!

Also at the same time, incumbent cable operators and telecoms accelerated their efforts to roll out service in more areas at faster speeds. These new buildouts or facility upgrades were often coupled with marketing programs that offered six-month, one-year, or even "lifetime" (two-year minimum contract) discounted rates. In Lompoc, Calif., for instance, the city struggled through three years of effort to build a working WiFi network while previously hard-to-obtain cable and DSL service became cheap and ubiquitous. (Lompoc overcame many difficulties and has a functioning and reportedly growing network that charges half the price it used to.)

EarthLink, MetroFi, and Kite Networks had the largest number of city contracts, and each exited the muni WiFi business between mid-2007 and mid-2008. EarthLink, which recently had its first quarter of recovery after dissolving its municipal WiFi division in 2007, laid off more than half its total staff in 2007, and spent nearly a year winding down its WiFi networks and writing off its losses. It paid $5 million to Houston to exit a $50 million commitment there. MetroFi shut down its nine-city network entirely in mid-2008, after partially unwiring Portland, Ore. Kite Networks—which at one point operated the largest contiguous US WiFi network in Tempe and Chandler, Ariz.—more or less vanished in early 2008 after being sold by its parent company to another firm the previous year.