Philadephia Subsidizes Wi-Fi
Two years later, Philadelphia is still trudging ahead with its plans. In May 2007, the city and EarthLink announced that the 15-square-mile proof of concept on the Wireless Philadelphia project was complete, and the 135-square-mile Wi-Fi mesh network was on its way to being finished by the end of 2007. "We are thrilled to expand the City's leadership position in using wireless technology to meet our people's needs and to enhance the City's services, visitor experience and business environment," pronounced Mayor John F. Street. According to Philadelphia’s 2007-2008 budget documents, the city will be operating at a loss of nearly $500,000 for the calendar year. (Those documents also show that EarthLink’s investment will be $1 million without any sharing of revenues.)

Despite EarthLink’s recent financial troubles, Philly is slated to get its massive wireless hotspot. And though EarthLink now boasts completed metro Wi-Fi rollouts in Corpus Christi, Texas, and Anaheim, Calif., it has no plans to spend any new capital on municipal networking projects in 2008, according to an EarthLink spokesman (who declined to be interviewed for this story).

Back in Chaska, some residents have soured on the Chaska.net’s Wi-Fi service. According to the Chaska Herald, residents have had numerous problems with the town’s service, including frequent service outages and bugs, which prompted Chaska City Councilor Gino Businaro to ask, "Are we marketing a product that we can't deliver?" in January 2007. A sampling from the Herald’s online forum reveals the dissatisfaction: One resident wrote: “Chaska.net needs to invest in some heavy improvements AND admit they aren't everything they claim to be.”

Another resident wrote: “I live directly across the street from an antenna and can always connect to the network, but cannot actually get to the WWW. I'd say I can actually use the Internet about 10 percent of the time. Most of my neighbors have dropped the service because it was so unreliable.”

Mayer, the celebrated IS manager, left Chaska in April 2006 and joined EarthLink as a senior technical project manager. Last month, the Chaska Herald reported that since Mayer’s departure, the city has had trouble finding and keeping IS staffers for Chaska.net. In all, the paper reported, “It’s been a difficult 18 months for the city’s wireless Internet service.”

Techdirt.com, a corporate intelligence and analysis website, has been following the muni Wi-Fi debate for many years, pointing out all the flaws and undue hype. “The fact remains that there are plenty of useful applications of municipal wireless; delivering widespread public Internet access, and making money from it, may simply not be one of them,” writes analyst Carlo Longino. “Also, as we've stated before, Wi-Fi—a local networking technology—may not be the best technology to use for covering large areas.”