The Wall Street Journal has an article on cities in the US where large-scale Wi-Fi networks have been deployed and are being used: Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, San Francisco and Philadelphia. Oklahoma City’s network is devoted to public safety, Minneapolis is a mixed-used network. In both cases, the city is paying for its use of the network (in the case of Minneapolis, the provider makes extra money by charging for access).
San Francisco is not really the municipality’s project. Rather, a mesh vendor called Meraki is deploying Wi-Fi in different neighborhoods and housing projects, trying to grow the network organically. Philadelphia got a group of investors to take over the network from EarthLink although they have not revealed any concrete plans on who is going to be the anchor tenant(s), how much they will pay, and the terms, all of which are critical to the success of Philadelphia’s network.
Finally, the WSJ article has an audio podcast associated with it. I was interviewed for the podcast.
A Second Look at Citywide Wi-Fi:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122840941903779747.html
WSJ Podcast interview with Esme Vos
http://podcast.mktw.net/wsj/audio/20081205/pod-wsjjrlavallee/pod-wsjjrlavallee.mp3
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