Municipal Wi-Fi

[fatjoe3833]

A few years ago, political leaders on Long Island launched a plan to provide free Wi-Fi across 750 of the Island's 1200 square miles. The program would not cost taxpayers a dime and would be paid for by advertising. Now, the plan seems pretty much dead. No company wants to invest millions of dollars in infrastructure without a promise of recouping the investment.

I hope that this project does eventually materialize. I think that free Wi-Fi would be great for the local economy.

I was wondering if anyone lives in a community that has free municipal Wi-Fi? Is the service cost effective and/or a boost to the local economy?

[tdlrali]

Oakland County, MI has pretty decent coverage, but it's slow and unstable.

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by tdlrali

Oakland County, MI has pretty decent coverage, but it's slow and unstable.

I don't know about the quality of service, but the coverage areas are still very small - only a few square miles out in a 900-square-mile county. They haven't expanded nearly as fast at originally planned.

[Protronie]

Greensboro, NC has talked of doing it city-wide. Then they scaled it down to downtown... then scaled it down again to City Park... they been talking about it now for three years.
As of right now... all public libraries have free wi-fi.
The PART bus system has mobile wi-fi on the Greenboro, Winston-Salem, & High Pt. express buses... not sure if the Mt Airy/Boone bus has it or not.
Our regular city buses (GTA) do not but seeing how must of them is standing room only using a computer on them is hopeless.
I know UNCG has wifi in each of their buildings... not sure about GTCC, Greensboro College, or A&T, but if UNCG does I'm pretty sure the other colleges do too... we only have five here.

IMO the biggest obstacle to free city-wide wi-fi is Time Warner cable (Road Runner) and Clearwire. Not to mention Bell South & AT&T. None of them want their subscribers to be able to just turn on their lappy and connect for free.

[ham90mack]

I do not live in an area with muncipal Wi-Fi, but here is some information that you might be interested in.

According to Wired 16.03:

There are over 300 muncipal Wi-Fi projects out there, but of those 17 are dead, 22 are under consideration, 64 are under early development, 86 are under construction, and 116 are in operation. However, most of those under operation are in small towns, cities, and counties where the cost of maintaining such a network is small. Many of the dead projects are from big cities, including Washington D.C, San Francisco, Chicago, and Atlanta, since it was too expensive. The largest city with muncipal Wi-Fi is Philladelphia (6th largest city in the U.S.).

Interestingly, the map shown with this information does not show Long Island as anything, but it does show that New York, NY is under construction.

[artdutra04]

The downtown area and Hubbard Park in my hometown have free Wifi.

While I may not have any concrete numbers, the public seems to appreciate the free Wifi and will hang around more in the park and downtown area to use it.