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July 28, 2005

Get Your Boondoggle On

The latest mania among city governments is to provide citywide Wi-Fi (wireless fast internet) as a public utility - in short, to make an entire city a wireless "hot spot".

I've asked since the beginning of this craze - where's the upside? Is it a city revenue generator? Or just another bureaucratic sinecure to feed the maw of local empire-building?

I'm still wondering:

Half of all municipal Wi-Fi network projects won't break even, a JupiterResearch report released Wednesday claims.
The report says that the cost of building and maintaining a municipal wireless network will average $150,000 per square mile over five years. The study acknowledged that the benefits of municipal networks are hard to quantify, but based its estimate that half the networks wouldn't break even on the assumption that the benefit would be $25 per user per month.
The rationale, of course, is to make a city more economically competitive. We apparently have to bleed money to make money.

Saint Paul is currently exploring starting a city wi-fi utility.

Posted by Mitch at July 28, 2005 07:28 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Again, people....if anyone who supports this kinda thing can give me ONE good reason why the private sector CAN'T do this....I'm all ears.

Posted by: Dave at July 28, 2005 12:38 PM

Paging King ...

Posted by: Night Writer at July 28, 2005 02:01 PM

Yet another excuse for a city-wide monopoly. No thank you.

Posted by: htom at July 28, 2005 04:29 PM

This is a huge waste of money. There are already a lot of coffee shops with free service and both Comcast and Qwest offer high-speed service in all of downtown. Granted, it costs $50/month or so but if you can afford a wireless card and dial-up is just too slow for you...then you can afford $50.

Posted by: Michael Lomker at July 29, 2005 09:29 AM

Doesn't surprise me.

This is the same outfit that tore out the ballfields at Northdale Rec at Dale Street and Arlington, then replaced them with - ballfields.

But in the process, they had to replace the grass so did they seed it and water it? Hell no! They laid sod over an ENTIRE CITY BLOCK!

Oh, no, they didn't install sprinklers under all the fields - just one of them. So yeah, the other half the block is pretty much all dead now. Soccer is coming up - that ground ought to be like concrete.

But hey, maybe I can Wi-Fi surf the web while the kids are kicking up dust.
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Posted by: nathan bissonette at July 29, 2005 03:56 PM

And another thing . . . .

St. Paul charges an arm and a leg for property taxes to fund all these essential programs.

But in addition to that, they levy annual special assessments for maintenance for the street in front of my house; for maintenance of the curb, gutter and storm sewer along the street in front of my house; for maintenance of the alley behind my house; I get billed for water and sewer and recycling and I'm required to have trash service at my own expense.

No wonder they can afford to use my property taxes to pay for Wi-Fi - everything else is specially assessed in addition to the taxes.
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