SF Muni Wireless: Almost Dead?

Read Comments from Richard Martin who works for Information Week

Richard from Info Week points out the how San Fran's local leaders for years have made dumb decisions to build costly money sucking projects over the years. There have been a lot of supporters and non-supporters of larger Muni WiFi projects like the one in San Fran. I personally think Muni WiFi can be possible only if the local utility companies gas, water, power all come together and collective and mutually work with the local public safety agencies. Using these local utilities and public safety groups as the anchor tenants gives the city a chance of having a viable business model.

It now appears that EarthLink wants to back out of the San Fran Muni project unless something major changes. Like many other larger Muni Wirless projects the ROI and profit margin for the San Fran network are just hard to justify, thus the stance thatEarthLink is force to take. EarthLink is a profit making enterprise looking to stay in business. The margins are so tight and the upfront cost of deployment and the ongoing costs just make it a very difficult business model to make a profit.

At one time I thought the only one who could make Muni Wifi work was Google with the ability to sink billions of dollars in the "Build it they will come type of network". Having a anchor tenants along with some local location based and national advertising could help subsidize the cost and may help get close to a profitable position. It has become obvious that the WiFi for free model will not work for any provider looking to make any profit.

In some of my earlier posts two years ago when I worked for the Mesh Networking Group at Motorola I make several comments on how from a Public Safety prospective it some make sense to have a secure private wireless broadband infrastructure for first responder. Some smaller cities have deployed networks that accommodate the Public Safety Agencies with the ability to provide a separate segmented part of the network for the general public to use. We can't have this discussion with bringing up WiMAX. WiMAX has had a lot of hypoe but iis getting close to being a real options in the Muni Wireless space. But the cost of building out a WiMAX network is very large, so we shall see. The upcoming 700 MHz auctions may change the whole landscape as well.