Dade County, Fla., is abandoning plans for countywide wireless broadband access in favor of creating four temporary hot spots in public parks.
The hot spots will provide free Wi-Fi access for the next six months, courtesy of Motorola, Nortel, Cisco and Wialan.
This is just the most recent overly ambitious metro plan to be taken off the drawing board. Apart from the cost and unwieldiness of the project, the deployment hit snags when the Dade County school board refused to donate valuable spectrum that it owns to the cause. Then the mayor’s advisor on the project quit to take a high-paying job with a high-tech company.
According to the Miami Herald, Miami Mayor Carlos Alvarez sent a letter to an advisory committee last week, saying he was backing away from the ambitious county-wide plan that would have spread Wi-Fi access across 2000 miles. ”What we did not want to do when rolling out the Wireless Miami-Dade initiative,” he said in the letter, “is launch a service that was economically and technically unfeasible. Several communities before us attempted to do too much too soon, only to learn that their models were impractical, and more importantly, costly to taxpayers.”
The mayor had hoped to unwire all 2,000 miles of the county without using any tax dollars. Sound familiar? The no-cost-to-the-city model transferred costs to private providers willing to that that risk and, since EarthLink’s retreat from the market last year, there are no major providers willing to do that.
According to the Herald, the mayor “left open the possibility of advancing to the program later.” If the four hot spots are “successful,” another two may be added to rail and bus stations but the article does not define what the mayor or the vendor partners would consider a “success.” Since the service is free and users evidently will not be required to register profits and the promise of building market share would not seem to realistic measures of success.
The mayor is cushioning the announcement with vague references to failed projects around the country. But that’s more of a politician’s attempt to find victory in the trough of defeat.
As Glenn Fleishman notes in an insightful post:
‘The mayor is quoted stating, incorrectly, “Several communities before us attempted to do too much too soon, only to learn that their models were impractical, and more importantly, costly to taxpayers.” That’s really wrong. In all the Wi-Fi networks across the U.S., only a handful involved more than a few tens of thousands of dollars, and even in those cases, there was typically a public benefit. St. Louis Park, Minn., Chaska, Minn., and St. Cloud, Flor., are the most notable examples of public dollars spent to build networks; each is a relatively small town, and each has a different story to tell about outcomes.”
Click here to read the Miami Herald story.
Click here to read Glenn’s post.
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