A recent article in the Oregonian is talking about the struggling municipal wireless project in Portland, Oregon.
The dream of cheap, wireless Web access broadcast across whole cities -- a dream nurtured with great fervor around the country last year -- has largely collapsed.
In city after city, technical limitations and financial troubles have killed plans to replicate coffee shop Wi-Fi networks on a broad scale. Just last week, plans for networks in Chicago, Houston and San Francisco were scuttled when EarthLink Inc. disbanded its Wi-Fi team.
And yet in Portland, the dream survives.
Despite eight months of ridicule by bloggers and techies, and scores of complaints from would-be Web surfers who can't connect, Portland's network is proving stubbornly resilient.
Data from MetroFi Inc., the California company behind the project, indicate that thousands of people are quietly using the network. It isn't the plug-and-play, universal access of Web surfers' dreams, but it's not an out-and-out failure, either.
"I don't know of any municipal wireless network that has as much usage," said Chuck Haas, MetroFi's chief executive. "Portland is absolutely a success."
A friend asked what what I thought, especially around the suitability of 802.11, which prompted this stream of consciousness response ...
Obviously I've been out of the loop for a while, but I think that basically what it comes down to is "it's hard". Stream of consciousness follows ...
802.11 is a crap protocol for muni wifi but then it's also the only cheap, unregulated option which is volunteer groups are likely to get their hands on. It's also ubiquitous so even for companies they want to make it work because it means that they immediately have a wide potential customer base.
Community groups seemed pretty effective at the hotspot model and I think that largely that's because it allowed people to scratch their own itch (I wish I had wireless at my favourite cafe). The actual build out of a network (Seattle Wireless style) is much harder technically and has much less immediate value to the average person (geek or non-geek). It's also the technically interesting part of it.
Even though the press seems to have turned a mostly blind eye there are still groups actively doing this stuff, I'm still getting emailed translations of the wireless commons manifesto (I just got Hungarian) so it's obviously still interesting and worthwhile rhetoric to many people.
Also groups like Seattle Wireless, Il Sans Fil, CUWin, Friefunk seem to be quietly plugging along and getting things done. It's to the point where the hardware / software is actually there for an easy hotspot deployment ... I'm thinking about doing that in Wellington in the nearish future just to see what happens (Linksys WRT + OpenWRT + WifiDog, buy ten, disperse and watch).
It seems to mostly be the first world where community wireless is struggling. Huge parts of the rest of the world still seem to be barrelling along and making huge progress, it's just hard for us to follow along because not much of it is in English! Presumably this is for the simple reason that they get more out of it ... where as for us the bill for a broadband and/or 3g service is small enough that it's worth the smaller hassle and sink of personal time.
I think the interest in the press actually did us a huge disservice when we all started, it changed our expectations, got the wrong people involved etc. And when the glow from our 5 minutes ended people thought we had failed. I think we would have been much better off plugging away getting the infrastructure work done so we could move on to the bits which are interesting to the public. Imagine if the press had swooped in on RMS saying he was going to change the world when he was still in the early stages of writing gcc :-)
For commercial zero cost networks, I'm not surprised it's failing ... remember NetZero? :-) I thought Google might have a chance because they already have their head (and business) around the advertising side of things and the wireless was just another way of getting customers.
For volunteer based wireless commons (more then just hotspots, a network!) I think the majority of it will have to be adhoc mesh. Doing it with point to point infrastructure links is just too expensive and too much work for volunteers to maintain. The the Meraki stuff seems pretty cool, but I'm not personally interested until there's an open source solution. Meraki is based on the MIT Roofnet project, which I've been meaning to check it out for ever but I'm guessing that since it's been commercialised that the open source side of things will wither and die.
The other thing is that we based the model for community wireless around what we knew about open source ... and unfortunately they aren't really analogous, bandwidth is (at least at the moment) a scarce resource, it doesn't get better the more people that use it. Hence hotspots work well because you have a local donor with a itch being scratched, but networks suffer from the some problems as the commons.