Providing Free WiFi 

As a geek, you'd think this would be something I'd be in favor of. But as a fiscal conservative, I'm definitely not. Lately I've been reading how various cities are installing free, or even for fee WiFi networks. In Pennsylvania, Verizon has successfully pushed through a bill that would severely limit how those networks would be funded:

One provision of House Bill 30 (HB30), a wide-ranging telecommunications regulation bill that earned final approval by the state House and Senate on Friday, would prohibit a government or any entity it creates from offering broadband for a fee.

Philadelphia's city government is studying plans to deploy Wi-Fi wireless LAN access points throughout the city, each offering IEEE 802.11b access and linked to others via a wireless mesh network, said Dinanah Neff, the city's chief information officer. Deployment is set to begin in June 2005 and should be completed by June 2006.

The US$7 million to $10 million project is intended to encourage economic growth and help poor residents access the Internet with a broadband service priced at an estimated $15 to $25 per month, she said. About 60 percent of Philadelphia's neighborhoods, primarily poorer neighborhoods and less densely populated ones, don't have access to broadband services, according to Neff.

The article goes on to describe how this state bill will pretty much kill the project. All I can say to that is... good! In San Francisco, they're providing WiFi in various areas of the city for free. All I can say is... why the hell is a government body funding these networks?! I especially love how most of the time they justify it by saying that they'll be providing broadband internet access to "the poor".

Allow me to ask a few basic questions. First, how may of the "the poor" have computers with WiFi cards to be able to take advantage of these systems? If they don't have the necessary equipment, am I going to have to pay for their computer and WiFi card as well? What benefit does having broadband access give "the poor" that I need to pay for? Do I really need to pay for someone else to be able to download gigabytes of music, or porn, or anything else? We're not talking about making sure they have heat, or clothing, or food. We're talking about subsidizing something that is not needed. If I buy broadband internet access, and I want to pay for it (which I do), then that is my business and I'm happy to do it. Should I also have to pay for my neighbor's access? Should I pay for a complete stranger's access? I sure as hell don't want to, but I don't have a lot of choice here.

When the government provides things, believe me when I say it won't ever be as good as a private solution. If a city builds infrastructure for a 802.11b standard system (which are already out of date), what happens when a better standard comes out? We'll be stuck with an expensive out of date system that nobody will want to pay to replace. If a private company does this, the customer base will decide whether a change is needed, and pay for it if they want it. If they don't want to pay for it, does that mean it's the governments responsibility to come in an pay for it? Not at all. If the public doesn't want to pay for it privately, that means that private industry needs to rethink their deployment costs, or their pricing model, or the technology they've chosen. When the government intervenes, that only encourages more expensive and poorer quality solutions, that the public attempted to weed out.

Of course this doesn't mean that WiFi will always have a cost associated with it. Several years ago, Starbucks went into a deal with T-Mobile to have fee based WiFi access inside their stores. Some people decided to buy it, but most people decided it wasn't worth the cost. Now, years later, many stores including Panera Bread are now providing WiFi access for free in their stores. They've decided to attract customers to their stores by providing free WiFi. Now other stores will probably for forced to do the same thing just to compete on the same level. This sort of innovation is bringing about free WiFi, and is a good way to do it. Instead of selling a service for a fee, they're using the service as a way to attract customers to pay for other things they provide. If governments start taking over these services, that takes away an option for a store to be innovative in a way that attracts paying customers.

Let's keep the government out of areas that they have no business dealing with. Providing broadband internet access to the masses isn't something they need to encourage. Not everyone wants it, and not everyone wants to pay for it.