San Francisco, Chicago and St. Louis all [recently] announced significant and perhaps fatal roadblocks in their municipal Wi-Fi projects.

“Frankly, I’m not surprised at all,” said Dewayne Hendricks of Tetherless Access, [which is] a provider of metropolitan wireless-networking services. “[It has] been clear this was going to happen for a while now.”

Chicago – one of the most recent cities to curtail its citywide Wi-Fi project – was unable to eke out a viable business plan with either AT&T or troubled Internet service provider EarthLink.

It’s no wonder. It was not a viable solution the way it was positioned. When you don’t have buy-in (read that as real investment from the municipality), you have nothing.

Real Solutions Need Real Investments

The lack of any municipal investment is a hollow commitment for the success of a municipal Wi-Fi project. You also need an internal champion for such an initiative.

With the business models that were pitched to municipalities, the idea of an investment or real ownership of the project was always downplayed. “Free Wi-Fi” without any investment or commitment was a big selling point and was never delivered in a successful manner.

This is also from Wired:

It’s a harsh dose of reality that juxtaposes the giddy enthusiasm for ubiquitous Wi-Fi that cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, Houston and many others displayed only a few years ago. In part, that enthusiasm was based on a handful of assumptions.

The first was that advertising could support citywide connectivity [and enable] the services to be free or [cheap]. Many proponents also argued that residents would actually want to use the free networks. Both assumptions were mistaken.

You had people hyping this and just about guaranteeing it was the next ubiquitous city service since sewers and garbage collection without any cost to the resident or city. I would like to see Waste Management or Allied Waste sell their service for free with a mysterious way to get funded.

This also comes from Wired:

With a range of just 100 or 200 feet at [the] most, Wi-Fi networks simply don’t provide adequate access especially for people in buildings or other enclosed areas.

As a result, most networks deployed in the past several years have required between 20 [percent] and 100 percent more access points than budgeted, according to journalist Glenn Fleishman who publishes Wi-Fi Net News.

This just shows that the Wi-Fi “experts” aren’t experts at all. If they were, they would have realized this on initial design models and figured out the costs in advance instead of having to go back to the well for more money that wasn’t there in the first place.

There is no cookie-cutter approach or common rules of thumb for design. After you do a lot of networks, you either find some rules of design commonality or you find that each one is a custom job. Evidently, their depth of expertise was lacking.

I wrote this after listening to panel discussions at WiMAX World several weeks ago:

It was interesting to see that some industry executives were more apologetic for the fizzling out of municipal Wi-Fi projects than being evangelists for adding wireless capabilities to cities.

Whoever was advising these cities on trying to get a free service to add into the infrastructure without any investment but keep the rights to control and oversee the services was just wrong.

What Really Scares the Incumbent

Look to WiMAX and fiber backbones to be the real solution. Also look to the incumbent phone companies to fight it tooth and nail. Give me WiMAX and I can obsolete the central office and the whole business model. Give me WiMAX and I can upgrade larger areas faster and more effectively than Wi-Fi.

Give me WiMAX and I can get personal devices like they have in Japan and South Korea that make the BlackBerry and Palm Pilot look like you’re carrying around an eight-track player. Give me WiMAX and the incumbent phone companies will put up a stronger fight than what they did with the Tri-Cities referendum a couple years ago.

Look beyond the U.S. for working examples. Wireless solutions are more sophisticated elsewhere and they are up and running with devices you can’t even buy here. Look at Cisco’s latest acquisition for $330 million. This is from IT Business Edge on Oct. 31, 2007:

WiMAX is seeing lots of activity. Navini Networks (the WiMAX antenna specialist) along with Beceem, Fujitsu and Runcom launched the Smart Antenna RF Test Alliance (SMART). The announcement came a couple days after the news that the vendor is being acquired by Cisco.

Cisco is trying to position itself in a major way. If WiMAX wasn’t a strategic direction, Cisco wouldn’t be dropping $330 million. We are trying to catch up when it comes to wireless. To those who think municipal wireless is still a viable solution, you better get a couple things straight:

1. Get yourself some real network engineers who understand telephony and network design. That means paying for expertise and not sending out RFPs and asking for free input.

2. Get yourself some good lobbyists and get some relationships going with lawmakers. Lobbyists are as common in the telecom industry as fleas are on a junkyard dog. If you don’t have them on your dog in the fight, expect to lose to the junkyard dog.

3. Don’t sell hype. Sell solutions. Free Wi-Fi is like saying free garbage pickup. People in the know do know better.

4. Stop listening to those who misinterpreted the market and now are trying to sidestep their misguided evangelism and seminars. Network strategy and implementation is a long-term effort and isn’t a flavor of the month.

5. Get ready to spend some cash to do things right. This is an infrastructure issue that needs real funding. This isn’t the same as making the corner coffeehouse a hot spot.

Carlinism: There’s no such thing as a new $5,000 Rolls-Royce. You get what you pay for.