Muni Wi-Fi still breathes in St. Louis

News of the demise of the proposed muni wireless network in St. Louis, like that of muni wireless in general, has been greatly exaggerated. AT&T has not abandoned the city or its faith in the municipal market. It is focusing on a downtown hot spot pilot.
AT&T’s announcement last week that it would not deploy city-wide Wi-Fi in St. Louis came as no surprise. But this was not a case of an incumbent stonewalling muni service. The city and its corporate partner have been wresting with the problem of maintaining continuaous electrical service to the node sites for some time. AT&T has emerged as a significant player in the muni market and, in St. Louis, it had good reason not to pursue the deployment. Getting electricity to node sites to simply power the network promised to more than quadruple the original estimated cost of $6 million.

Unfortunately, a number of blogs, like this one, are erroneously reporting that AT&T is “scrapping” the network and using that notion as the jumping off point to overgeneralize about the evolving market. . (In fact, instead of a city-wide deployment, the company is looking at providing a downtown wireless hot spot.) These reports tend to present anchor tenancy as the only practical business model for muni deployments. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anchor tenancies up the profit picture for private providers (it’s part of the free enterprise model in economics that profit has to exist for corporations or there’s no reason to be in the market) but they represent only one factor in a multitude of factors that can impact municipal deployments.

These generalizations leave no room for discussion of muni networks as a necessary infrastructure for communities to grow and prosper. There are, of course, purely public models in which municipalities build out broadband, just as they would any other necessary infrastructure (highways, electrical service, sewers, sidewalks)–not to mention the many unnecessary projects (most notably sports stadiums) that governments subsidize and that generate a fraction of the controversy than what opponents drum up around muni wireless.

If anything, muni deployments have become more interesting now that the era of free deployments is behind us. Network proposals that we’re seeing now cover a range of municipal expectations, as well as multiple models aimed at making the deployments financially palatable to the tex-paying public.

The Associated Press’s report on AT&T’s decision to scale back in St. Louis is one of the better ones I’ve see. It notes that the downtown pilot is expect to be operating next year.

St. Louis will be an interesting market to watch because it’s unlikely that AT&T has entirely dismissed thoughts about muni wireless in that city. WiMAX and 700Mhz services represent technologies worth watching on the horizon. Neither require the node density of Wi-Fi deployments and either could make attractive alternatives in building a city-wide network if St. Louis decides it needs more bandwidth for wireless communications services than current cellular technology can provide.

Meantime, AT&T now proposes a downtown Wi-Fi hot spot as an alternative to a city-wide deployment. Given the daunting challenges of getting electricity to the many nodes needed for a city-wide network, this seems like a reasonable–if tiny–alternative. It would be nice to see a number of hot spots spring up around the city to provide a free tier of service in neighborhood locations, such as libraries, community offices and public plazas. It is possible to parse out local services even if ubiquity is impossible.

Click here to read the Associated Press report on St. Louis’s network.