More Muni-Wi-Fi Project Slowdowns in Boston, Cleveland

As major US cities and American carriers still struggle for what's looking more and more like the same piece of the Wi-Fi pie for revenue, two more municipal projects appear to be slowing down. The Boston Globe reported Wednesday that the non-profit organization set up to manage that city's project now says it's unlikely to be completed at any time in 2008.

This just days after interest from carriers in Cleveland's project is reportedly waning after that city's mayor decided to reject any bids from companies that would require the city to be their anchor tenant - to sign on to a long-term project, usually with plenty of funding up-front. The term comes from the world of real estate, where site management firms make commitments to build shopping malls once they've secured anchor tenants to guarantee customers. A dispute over anchor tenancy provisions is believed to have killed a deal between Earthlink and the city of Chicago last August.

Cleveland has already received at least five major bids, according to reports, two of them from Earthlink and MetroFi. But they too required the city to serve as anchor tenants. So it rejected those bids, and late last month, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson announced he wouldn't be considering any more bids of that sort.

"The City is moving Mayor Jackson's goal of Cleveland becoming a Digital City of Choice," read an October 25 statement from his office, "by taking a phased approach to building a broadband infrastructure that is not dependent on an anchor tenancy model which was one of the reasons for rejecting the proposals from Earthlink and MetroFi. A phased approach also better helps the City navigate the tenuous financial conditions and instability of the industry which were also factors in the City's decision. Another part of the City's new approach to Wi-Fi includes forging multiple public/private partnerships to strategically place wireless hot spots throughout the City using easy to install and affordable equipment."

That phased approach presumes each phase covers small, limited areas - which could be interpreted to mean, so much for WiMAX. While the so-called "lily pad approach" appears to be working, in a limited vein, in cities like Cincinnati, it depends on multiple private partnerships that can affordably sponsor coverage to limited areas. If higher-grade technology were deployed instead, each "pad" would naturally be somewhat larger, resulting in fewer sponsors that would have to be larger and looser with their spare change.

Meanwhile in Boston, the non-profit organization OpenAirBoston was founded to manage a WiFi buildout in stages, starting with select neighborhoods. Local fundraisers are being held to raise enough to establish a blanket of routers over a mere single square mile of the Grove Hall district, about a half-mile northeast of Franklin Park.

But what engineers are soon learning is that these locally-sponsored routers have coverage areas that can be measured in feet, but also overlap, cancel each other out, and frequently find themselves canceled out by alleyways and bad weather. The eventual solution, some engineers have told the City of Boston, is WiMAX; but the problem with introducing that topic is that it has created a kind of "Wait for WiMAX" effect that has dampened spirits at those local fundraisers.

The Globe says the Grove Hall project will continue to serve about 8,000 lower-income households with free or affordable Wi-Fi service in the meantime, though it appears for now to be a single lily pad in a very small and stagnating pond.