Where Do We Stand in the Muni Wi-Fi Hype Cycle?

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The following is excerpted from my presentation at W2i's Digital Cities Joint State Briefing in Tallahassee on March 26, 2008.

• Listen to the Audio (45 Min.)

"There’s a notion that muni Wi-Fi, or metro Wi-Fi, is dead, complete with all the doom and gloom and accompanying press stories. In a way, a lot of this was inevitable, but it does have a chilling effect on the market. We got too far out of whack on the hype, the positive stuff, and now we’re getting too negative — 'oh, this is broken, it’s dead, it doesn’t work.' Yes, there have been failures, but it’s much more specific than saying the general idea of doing this is a failed concept.

"Philadelphia’s been very frustrating because they generated a lot of the early interest and a lot of the positive interest in this whole effort. But I’ve always said they’re a horrible example. They were a terrible example for anyone to follow. I think there were things wrong with their approach, but it wasn’t that. But because they were the first big city, all of the players were willing to do unnatural things if they could associate their name with that endeavor. And so, on the equipment side…if you were going to play in Philadelphia, essentially you were going to give away a big chunk of the equipment. And all the other participants, they were doing something unnatural like that as well. But the problem with that is that it wasn’t repeatable.

"Yes, for the first city in the US that was happening, and maybe the people behind the scenes were smart to leverage that effect, that everybody wanted to be associated with it. But what it meant is that we weren’t validating the business model. There was no rational business model. And it wasn’t going to be repeatable, because once you’ve done it once, the other ones aren’t going to happen. The problem is that because it was touted very highly, we ended up with crazy expectations. Cities expected to get this stuff for free. They didn’t put much effort into figuring out what was the value of the network, what were we going to do with it, how much would it really cost, and so forth. So it really put us in a negative position.

"One of the positive things about getting all this doom and gloom behind us is that those expectations are now much more rational, and people are ready to move ahead in a more positive fashion understanding that yes, this infrastructure does cost something, it’s not going to be free. And if we’re going to go to the effort of doing it, we need to understand where the money comes from and what’s the value of this endeavor, and is it worth it."

Wireless veteran Phil Belanger is co-principal at Novarum, a strategic consulting firm assessing the performance of citywide wireless networks.