The Chaska Herald has a long article on what is happening with the Chaska muni Wi-Fi network, one of the first in the US. It also reports on the municipal wireless networks in three Minnesota communities: Buffalo, Moorhead, and St. Paul:
For the most part, there is a greater confidence in Chaska.net these days. Bandwidth has increased (119 percent in the last year), signals have strengthened (thanks to more router gateways) and those with expectations of a system to rival cable at a dial-up price, have moved on . . . Chaska.net, with around 2,100 customers, currently offers residential speeds of up to 1.2 Mbps for $19.99 a month . . . Despite the $3.3 million investment (including almost $1 million in fiber), the service has never been a money maker for the city. Over the next five years, Chaska.net operations are expected to turn a maximum annual profit of $807 in 2010. The city is still paying down the debt on the service.
As you can see from the Chaska story, it is very difficult to make money just from delivering Wi-Fi service in a small community. Many small municipalities that have community-wide wireless networks use them for mostly municipal purposes. The network provides benefits to the municipality beyond the fees paid by people for access. In a larger city where there are lots of people walking around with mobile devices and where many are fed up with the slow 3G networks, there might be a better business case for outdoor Wi-Fi especially if the Wi-Fi provider can use advertising and sponsorships to help pay for the network’s costs. What remains to be seen is whether carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange (France), etc. will use Wi-Fi to offload their 3G data traffic.
Outdoor Wi-Fi base stations and indoor access points have improved dramatically since Chaska deployed their muni Wi-Fi network in 2004. Many of the technical problems encountered by the city and its residents have been reduced in current 802.11N (MIMO) wireless equipment. Novarum tested many outdoor networks with 802.11N and published a guide for cities and service providers that want to deploy these outdoor networks. See:
Guidelines for Successful Outdoor 802.11n Networks
The article also reports on St. Louis Park and Minneapolis (in addition to Moorhead and Buffalo). St. Paul doesn’t have a wireless network and I don’t think there are any current plans for one. They are more interested in fiber.