Perhaps when the 700MHz spectrum is made available, some success may follow, but then only if the allowed power limits are raised.

As a provider of WiFi in RV parks, really little municipalities, I can attest to the presence of real technological hurdles which will absolutely make it impossible to meet the goals espoused in this article, to wit “local governments provide citizens, businesses and public employees with low-cost or even free ubiquitous internet connectivity while outdoors.”

First among this is the limited range of today’s wireless gear. To say that your average wireless laptop has a range of 300feet is optimistic, but even using that figure as a guide to a successful muni-wifi deployment makes it necessary to pincushion the municipalities with towers to provide adequate coverage. This is a function of the low power requirements and the fact that 2.4GHZ and 5.7GHZ signals do not penetrate building materials well.

Even supposing the ability to acquire and deploy that density of access points, and leaving out the inherent problems of interference from adjacent APs, you are still left with the need to provide backhaul to each site. The best option for this is to wire each AP to the Internet, which is sometimes feasible, but expensive, and requires a new wired network of some complexity and size. That option is usually relegated to the wishlist of frustrated RF engineers, while the mesh idea is promoted.

There is no wireless mesh technology which works at scale. There is only so much spectrum, and it is unprotected, which means that you cannot scale without increasing noise, and you have no recourse against any existing noise. I’ve been doing wireless networks for years in extremely rural (jungles of Laos) and extremely metropolitan (Manhattan) areas, and the noise floor gets louder each year. Imagine the noise created by a whole metropolis being online!

And yet that’s the stated goal, to increase load, in the form of new, previously “underserved” users. Existing EVDO technologies, actually deployed and earning profit, provide a substantial fraction of WiFi’s promised bandwidth, and much longer range. Bandwidth requirements of users are sure to grow exponentially with wireless video applications.

WiFi, any 802.x flavor, is destined to fail to meet any reasonable performance metric, and the absence of any functioning metro-wireless network in the world should be proof enough that the hype is leading reality, and a comeuppance is in order.

Say no to municipal wireless until technology changes, then at least wait for a single successful venture before spending our money on pie-in-the-sky dreams.

Sincerely,

Mike Burns