For the past nine months or so, I had the pleasure of sitting on a small group with tctvjohn, epersonae and chad360 (among other folks like Deb Vinsel from TCTV), putting our brains to work about how a city sponsored wifi network might work in downtown.

From what I can tell, even though the city council put out $20,000 to jump start the process, a public wifi network isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Here is the summary of the report we sent to the council's General Government committee (Joe Heyer, TJ Johnson and Jeff Kingsbury):

The deployment of WiFi is not a simple process. The $20,000 the City has set aside for the project will not build a system. Many other cities have tried to deploy WiFi using a variety of models and many have decided to end or postpone their projects due to high costs and low revenue potential.

Many wireless companies do not want to franchise for Wi-Fi without a guaranteed anchor tenant (the city) because the financial returns from subscribers have not been sufficient to sustain a system.

It may be possible to deploy a great deal of WiFi connectivity in the downtown core by simply encouraging area businesses to create ‘hot-spots’ in their stores. However, Wi-Fi in downtown public areas (and we hope city-wide) will require a much bigger, expensive process. Questions about operation, ownership, policy issues and access to City owned assets will need to be ironed out.

It is not outside the realm of possibility, but it is not a process that can be accomplished in a short period of time without a significant financial investment.

Here is a link to the report itself.

My understanding of where we left this off is that we'd continue to talk about pushing this forward. First, ironing out the policy issues, starting with city rules (chad360, you want to expand on this?) that might stand in the way of wifi deployment.

The funds that the city put forward might be a good starting point to scoping out what would be possible in terms of starting up a regional project, but not enough for a downtown network. I still hope we can move forward on this.

I emailed a few folks at the city about where we might be going with this project a few weeks ago, and got (partially) this response from Joe Hyer:

Tj and I recommended to the Council that WiFi is not a project we can do well right now, and is more, financially, than we can or should be biting off. We will have WiFi available in the Oly Center and City Hall soon, but could not really find the needed funds to go further.

I admit, the kicker for me was when I took my laptop downtown, picked 10 random locations, and attempted to connect to the internet. In 7 of them, I had multiple open WiFi connection I could use. In another 2, there was one unsecured network available. And in only one could I not get an unsecured signal to log onto (there were 3 encrypted networks but not a public one).

In many ways, Downtown at least is wired. We can't 'market' that fact for tourism - but it is there are available to most savvy users. And to go to the whole city is an infrastructure project well beyond us - unless we were to consider a utility in that area, which would take a lot more research.

In the short-term, and outside what the city council can do, I remember chad360 chattering on about a project in Seattle where people publish their available, public wifi signals. I'm thinking these articles are what he was talking about, but if he could elaborate...

Popular Science: Free Neighborhood wifi

Introduction to Neighbornode

Lifehacker: Connect with your neighbors online

I could see us doing on our own what the city can't do with a handful of neighborhoods setting up their own shared systems. This at least seems to be a project that the city could offer assistance on to the neighborhood associations. There is already two downtown associations that could collaborate on this.