Thursday, March 28, 2024

Muni Wi-Fi’s Second Chance

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

Four years ago, municipal Wi-Fi rode in on a great wave of promise: free Internet for all residents! It offered a utopian vision of whole cities becoming hotspots where people could surf the Web from a park bench, closing the digital divide in the process.

That promise has gone largely unfulfilled. After signing Internet companies to big contracts to blanket their cities with access points to create mesh networks, municipal governments have since experienced a severe case of buyer’s remorse.

The problem was that they set out with the wrong business model, explains Stan Schatt, vice president of ABI Research and lead author of a new report projecting a 60-fold increase in government-funded Wi-Fi coverage over the next four years.

“There’ve been all kinds of approaches that have been tried, mostly unsuccessful,” Schatt said in an interview with InternetNews.com. Consumer Internet use should be a secondary concern for muni Wi-Fi deployments.

“Most of the business is public safety and secure internal networks for municipal workers,” Schatt said, describing the government services as an “anchor tenant” of the municipal model.

According to Schatt, citywide Wi-Fi networks will work if the government’s emergency services networks are established as the engine of revenue, delivering the provider a “guaranteed flow of funds for a period of time.”

Once the network’s revenue structure is established, the consumer applications can follow. Schatt anticipates a model where cities would offer residents Internet access for a nominal monthly charge, with subscriptions driven by the increasing use of mobile devices to access the Internet.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

Subscribe to Data Insider

Learn the latest news and best practices about data science, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, data security, and more.

Similar articles

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Data Insider for top news, trends & analysis

Latest Articles