Pioneering Wi-Fi City Sees Startup Woes

As the Donner Party would tell us (if it could), pioneers can usually expect a bumpy ride en route to their intended destination. Travis Reed of the Associated Press (via The Boston Herald) reports:

ST. CLOUD, Fla. - More than a month after St. Cloud launched what analysts say is the country’s first free citywide Wi-Fi network, folks in this 28,000-person Orlando suburb are still paying to use their own Internet service providers as dead spots and weak signals keep some residents offline and force engineers to retool the free system.

Joe Lusardi’s friends back in New York couldn’t believe it when he told them he’d have free Internet access through this city’s new Wi-Fi network. “Everybody’s happy they were going to have it, but I don’t know if they’re happy right now,” said Lusardi, a 66-year-old retired New York City transit worker.

The same troubles with the small town’s big Internet project could be lessons for municipalities from Philadelphia to San Francisco considering similar networks.

St. Cloud officials are spending more than $2 million on a network they see as a pioneering model for freeing local families, schools and businesses from monthly Internet bills. It also promises to help the city reduce cell-phone bills and let paramedics in an ambulance talk by voice and video to hospital doctors…

[tags]st. cloud fl,orlando suburb,wi-fi pioneer,free citywide internet access,city network[/tags]