Municipal Wireless Success Demands Public Involvement, Experts Say

Most media have it wrong. Municipal wireless networks across the United States didn't stumble in 2007 - high-profile cities where deals fell apart, such as Chicago, San Francisco and Houston, were not going to finance, own or operate their respective networks. These weren't municipal networks at all. The business model that faltered in 2007 was the "private corporate franchise" model based on the deal that Philadelphia and EarthLink agreed to in 2006. It was, in fact, the free market that failed last year - not governments in their traditional role as the builders and maintainers of critical infrastructure.

How we define a municipal network has repercussions for every aspect of next-generation network-building, and it will reverberate through 2008. Jon Peha, associate director of the Center for Wireless and Broadband Networking at Carnegie Mellon University, addresses these problems in his work. "Unfortunately some define municipal networks as a network that serves a city, and some define it as the city government's network, and people argue about exactly what the latter means," Peha said. "I often write about models for a 'wireless metropolitan-area network' (WiMAN), because it is a broader term that carries no ambiguous baggage."

Craig Settles, a wireless consultant and the president of Successful.com, defines municipal networks, at a minimum, as ones with "local government involvement, whether it's a government manager driving the project as is the case in Greene County, N.C., or the economic development office is working with community organizers and local businesses to drive the project - similar to what's happening in Seattle."

Networks can't continue to be characterized as municipal when the municipality neither owns nor has principal or ultimate responsibility and authority over that network, said Michael Maranda, president of the Association for Community Networking. "Just because a network may cover the bulk of a muni territory, and just because a city initiates public processes around the idea of such a venture to make some assets available in furtherance of such an effort - we can't call it muni."

Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.com, lays out a spectrum of ways municipalities can be involved as an anchor tenant; as a subscriber, leasing out or donating city-owned property on which wireless nodes can be mounted, or leasing out or donating backhaul (e.g., fiber access); as an investor or guarantor of a loan; [and] as the owner of the network (e.g., Corpus Christi, Texas, and Burbank, Calif.). At its heart, there's a battle brewing between "free-marketeers" who favor the government taking a hands-off approach to broadband networking, and those in favor of government involvement to help direct efforts at the national, state and local levels.

When the NSFNET was privatized beginning in 1995, a huge boom ensued whereby numerous corporations built broadband infrastructure. Unfortunately when the free-market technological bubble burst in 2000, governments at all levels refused to get involved in broadband networking. Today, after more than a half-decade of market failure, as a growing number of other countries continue to pull ahead of the United States - deploying far better and more accessible broadband infrastructure - municipalities have an opportunity to turn things around. Joshua King, senior network administrator for the Chambana.net community Web hosting project, puts it this way: "A 'municipal' network is a network whose ownership and operation is under the control of a city and is run for the common good of the citizens of that city rather than for profit."

Like many, King is not against public-private partnerships, but he supports the notion that the core intent of these networks must be the public good and not corporate profits. "This does not mean that the network cannot be utilized by local businesses to turn a profit, nor does it mean that third-party companies can't be contracted to deploy or maintain a network," King said. "But that the network itself