From its inception, municipal WiFi has served two masters: while private network pioneers such as Earthlink struggled back in the mid 2000s with establishing the subscriptions necessary to sustain experimental systems in Philadelphia and San Francisco, muni WiFi also had roots in the academic community, and in efforts to bridge the digital divide. Case in point was the collaborative deployment of a mesh network to provide free, outdoor WiFi access to the public in
Harvard Square advanced by Harvard University, the City of Cambridge and the local business association. In its public persona, muni WiFi has often been supported by local governments who view municipal networks as a mechanism for local service delivery, ranging from public safety and emergency warning to city management systems - or as a form of social service that would provide broadband access to residents who cannot afford private high-speed solutions.
According to
recent ABI Research, over 400 US municipalities are now “in various phases of deployment and disillusionment with their networks,” as they struggle to maintain networks based on a ‘free’ or low cost business model.
Canada has been spared much of the acrimony that developed between public and private WiFi providers who vied for exclusive rights in the US, due in large part to widespread deployment of cable in Canada, and as a result has witnessed a goodly amount of activity from both sides of the public/private divide. Some of the early Canadian grassroots technology initiatives include projects developed by the BC Wireless Network Society,
‘FreeTheNet” which worked to develop WiFi access in one of the poorest communities in Vancouver, Île Sans Fil in Montreal and a group called Wireless Toronto which relied on volunteer programming, etc. for the deployment of WiFi in local community spaces. Many of these groups continue to offer services – Wireless Toronto, for example, provides free hotspot access at 33 locations in the GTA – and this public approach has been adopted more recently by some of the smaller centres, such as Edmonton, where the Free WiFi Project was launched in 2008. At the same time, private providers have also been active in Canada, ranging from FatPort , which offers a turn-key WiFi solution to location owners who wish to provide a hotspot connection to their customers, to the advertising based Vex Canada, which launched this past July.
