Atlanta-based EarthLink's February confirmation that it was selling off its municipal Wi-Fi business sounded the final death knell for some cities' ambitious goals to offer ubiquitous wireless broadband. With such a large player abandoning plans to build wireless networks, many lost hope that wide-area Wi-Fi could succeed. However, already having dismissed those visions as impractical, some city and county officials have been re-evaluating their blueprints, intentions and assumptions about wireless networks.

While some cities, such as San Francisco, Chicago and Birmingham, Ala., saw their Wi-Fi projects fold, and Philadelphia experienced delays and cost spikes, Minneapolis, Corpus Christi, Texas, and Riverside, Calif., have succeeded in creating a progressive broadband access option for residents and a productivity-enhancing, money-saving option for governments. The business model that is prevailing: governments as anchor tenants on a network with limited public access. “Before, you had cities getting up on this soapbox and saying, ‘We will use this network to raise up the under-privileged,’ and they all sang ‘Kumbaya’ and went home,” says Craig Settles, author of several books on the municipal Wi-Fi trend and CEO of Oakland, Calif.-based consulting firm Successful.com. “We're now in the sober reality the night after that party. It's now clear that if you do this, there's a lot to do — you need to find funds, build infrastructure, train a lot of people. The whole support structure costs a lot of money to put in place.”

The anchor-tenant model

Part of the early promise of municipal Wi-Fi networks was that business travelers could be a source of revenue. Another notion was that municipal Wi-Fi would foster new economic development. For the most part, neither has happened, though municipal networks still can be a factor in a positive relationship between cities and economic development forces.

Riverside, Calif., pursued municipal Wi-Fi largely because several business leaders in the university community urged the city to build a network to strengthen its high-tech reputation and provide easy Internet access for business people, says Steve Reneker, the city's chief information officer. That community support, in turn, helped attract Riverside's network partner, New York-based AT&T, to the table. “I think AT&T looked at that and the fact that we have 50,000 higher-education students here, and saw the potential for a lot of usage,” Reneker says.

Riverside initially planned for the city government to be the anchor tenant on the network. Ultimately, the guarantee of a large government client is what drew AT&T into the project, the first of its type for the giant telephone company. “We always planned to be an anchor tenant on the network because that was the only way to get a carrier to install it for free,” Reneker says. “We went to all of our city departments to see what applications they might have to get Wi-Fi-enabled. Now, we think the anchor tenant model will be used across the U.S.”

Riverside has found that a wide range of local government tasks — such as those performed by public safety agencies — can be made easier or less expensive by using wireless. With public safety vehicles equipped with Wi-Fi gear and 4.9 gigahertz links, officers can watch in-vehicle video and transmit forms and paperwork that they would otherwise need to return to an office to file. Public safety applications, including surveillance, were primary components of a Wi-Fi pilot project Riverside ran in late 2006 and early 2007.

However, Riverside also explored a number of possible network uses, such as parking meter monitoring, remotely controlled lighting for ball fields and networked traffic signals. “We're looking at uses by our sanitation department and at remote meter reading,” Reneker says, admitting that an initial proposal for Wi-Fi-enabled meter reading was not cost-efficient enough and is still being negotiated.

Still, while government use plays a prominent role in making Riverside's network a reality, the city has a tiered plan for public access to the network that reflects creative thinking some earlier muni-Wi-Fi business models missed: MetroFi-Free, a service with bandwidth limits of 512 kilobits-per-second downstream and 256 kilobits-per-second upstream. As the name implies, this service is free to users, with browser advertising picking up the tab (MetroFi is a service provider subcontracted by AT&T). Another package, AT&T Metro Wi-Fi, is a paid service that comes with a bandwidth upgrade to 1 megabit-per-second and less advertising. That plan is priced at $6.99 for daily access and $15.99 for a weekly pass.