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A Muni Wi-Fi Cautionary Tale
By Larry Hendrick | June 26, 2006
I wondered about this aspect of the Muni WiFi issue last week, when reading about another Muni WiFi, here in the USA, that is having a problem attracting users. The politicians assumed that if they built it, the people would flock to the service and it’s not happening.
Now it appears, according to this CNet article, that Taipei, with a working WiFi system, can’t attract but 20% of the required subscribers to pay for the cost of operating the system. The expectation of 250,000 users has been adjusted down to 200,000, but only 40,000 have decided to participate. That’s gonna hurt the ole’ pocket book.
TAIPEI, Taiwan–Peter Shyu, an engineer, spends most of his day out of the office, and when he needs an Internet connection he often pops into one of the many coffee shops in this city that offer free wireless access. He could use WiFly, the extensive wireless network commissioned by the city government that is the cornerstone of Taipei’s ambitious plan to turn itself into an international technology hub. But that would cost him $12.50 a month.
“I’m here because it’s free, and if it’s free elsewhere, I’ll go there too,” said Shyu, hunched over his IBM laptop in an outlet of the Doutor coffee chain. “It’s very easy to find free wireless connections.”
Despite WiFly’s ubiquity–with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population–just 40,000 of Taipei’s 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year, but it has lowered that target to 200,000.
That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other American cities that are building wireless networks of their own.
Like Taipei, these cities hope to use their new networks to help less affluent people get online and to make their cities more business-friendly. Yet as Taipei has found out, just building a citywide network does not guarantee that people will use it. Most people already have plenty of access to the Internet in their offices and at home, while wireless data services let them get online anywhere using phones, laptops and PDAs.
Topics: WiFi |