Now here is an excellent point. As I mentioned once before, nobody in my town is likely to use a notebook with wireless in our city outside of an Internet cafe for fear of having it stolen. With a soaring crime rate and no place left to put criminals, our city is not the best candidate for city-wide Wi-Fi. Still, what if it was and nobody even used it regardless?

It seems that the debate over municipal Wi-Fi has been knocked off course lately. Opponents to municipal Wi-Fi can almost always be traced back to incumbent broadband providers who have suspect motives. They’re going around, trying to push laws that prohibit any kind of municipal broadband offerings, claiming that it’s unfair competition from the bodies that are there to regulate them. That argument is usually a red herring.

If there were real competition, then the various municipalities would never even need to consider offering their own broadband services. It’s the incumbents’ inability to serve the needs of the population that leads to this issue in the first place. Secondly, the claim that municipalities shouldn’t use taxpayer money to fund network buildout rings quite hollow when the same complaining broadband providers are asking for tax subsidy handouts at the same time. These are the same providers who have received plenty of tax breaks in the past — often for promises they never kept. It’s tough to feel much sympathy for the incumbents in these situations. If they’re unable to serve a market and create real competition for services, then municipalities should have every right to step in.

However, this doesn’t mean that every municipal offering makes sense — and the focus on Wi-Fi for municipal broadband increasingly looks misplaced. In focusing on the debate above, people don’t pay as much attention to the purpose of municipal broadband and the technology choices being made. There are a number or reasons why a city might want to offer municipal broadband. It could be to connect homes and businesses that have been bypassed by incumbents. It could be to offer faster speeds and more connectivity to make the region more attractive to large employers. That strategy worked in Oregon for attracting Google (with muni fiber, not Wi-Fi). In too many cases, though, those who push muni-Wi-Fi seem to have much more general goals. It’s often something about improving the attractiveness of downtown areas, with the idea that people will come for the Wi-Fi and stay for the shopping. [Read the rest]