The Failure of Public WiFi

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SSRN-​​The Failure of Public WiFi by Eric Fraser:

This short piece describes the fail­ure of the wide­spread plans to pro­vide pub­lic wire­less inter­net access. It iden­ti­fies three inter­re­lated types of causes for the near-​​universal fail­ure of these ambi­tious plans: reg­u­la­tory, tech­ni­cal, and economic.

As the arti­cle points out, WiFi — while incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful for constrained-​​area use, as in homes and busi­nesses — has not so far proven very suc­cess­ful when deployed across larger areas. There was once talk of police agen­cies and sim­i­lar being able to switch to lower cost, more flex­i­ble Wifi-​​based sys­tems for use in cars, but that has gen­er­ally not hap­pened. Instead, many are using 3G cel­lu­lar sys­tems, which at least are also com­mer­cial, off-​​the-​​shelf sort of solu­tions (King County, Washington, for exam­ple, puts lap­tops with 3G wire­less cards in its police cars).

Google’s exper­i­ment near its HQ is an excep­tion, and I think “Free the Net” in San Francisco might qual­ify as well. Neither are munic­i­pally funded, how­ever, and the model has not really been exportable across larger areas.

Ultimately, WiFi is an small-​​scale sys­tem, ideal for its pur­pose, and fun to extend to larger areas. WiMax and 3G are much more scal­able, and do not need to rely on so many access points. The den­sity required is sim­ply too high to cover large areas — I have some­times had trou­ble cov­er­ing an entire house effec­tively, much less a city block!

On the sup­ply side, the sys­tems sim­ply could not deliver what pro­po­nents promised. Because of WiFi’s tech­ni­cal and reg­u­la­tory lim­i­ta­tions on fre­quency and power out­put, blan­ket­ing a city proved to be pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive. Outdoor areas and a few build­ings could be wired for wire­less access, but no one could deliver anywhere-​​internet using WiFi. Signals from streets could not pen­e­trate large build­ings, and prop­erty rights pre­vented munic­i­pal­i­ties from installing the required tens of thou­sands of access points inside pri­vate build­ings through­out a munic­i­pal­ity. As a result, pub­lic WiFi net­works could be used indoors in only a few areas, or in many out­door locations.

Sadly, 3G espe­cially comes with costs that many had hoped WiFi might over­come. It is a “top-​​down” net­work­ing solu­tion, pro­vided by big com­pa­nies, and comes with sig­nif­i­cant band­width charges. WiFi seemed like a won­der­ful, “bottom-​​up” approach that lever­aged exist­ing wired band­width with­out added addi­tional wire­less costs. It still has poten­tial in many cir­cum­stances to be use­ful, whether it be for café set­tings, easily-​​deployed home net­work­ing, in rural areas with­out signal-​​blocking obsta­cles, or even unli­censed long-​​range point-​​to-​​point networks.

Fraser’s arti­cle pro­vides more in-​​depth analy­sis, includ­ing an expla­na­tion of the physics at work, the busi­ness mod­els, and more ideas about why pub­lic WiFi has not suc­ceeded. I rec­om­mend it.

(Thanks to the Legal Theory Blog for point­ing me to this.)

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