wrythings

Last weekend at the 3rd (now self-admittedly International) Summit for Community Wireless Networks (IS4CWN) the evidence was clear… (based on a plethora of conversations): Community Wireless Networking is not dead, and while (for those in the movement) it may seem to have been eclipsed in the media eye, it hasn’t really had much mainstream attention yet.

It’s the pseudo-muni model that has failed.

The tragedy of the past few years has been a penchant for political leadership to buy what network carriers have been selling. The term Municipal in Muni-Wireless and Muni-Broadband has been co-opted by the sellers of networks to mean coverage of a city rather a more proper sense of Municipal Ownership. Terms are easily diluted in that way, but what is more serious for the various Municipalities and their residents is the dilution of the contracts and hence the vision that drove their initiatives in the first place.

I’ve heard reports from both Houston and Phily that the network footprint won’t be as extensive as originally envisioned. Once you get a contract the city is bought in enough that successive renegotiations can easily be achieved, reducing risk and cost to the vendor, and increasing cost, decreasing scope (which is an aspect of quality) of service, and maybe you can get the city to buy in as an anchor tenant after all.

Cities struggle with their budgets, we know. When you don’t have confidence (which translates into political will) in the potential of these networks you aren’t likely to put your money where your mouth is. It’s foolish model of accounting for costs that can’t simply aggregate the demand of the community and suggest that it will be cheaper to the tax-payers or rate-payers if the Municipality does the network itself… or better yet if the model rolls out as Boston plans: structural separation for a wholesale model with any number of service providers having access to the network infrastructure on the same terms and with very low barrier to entry. (Oddly Chicago completely rejected the possibility of non-profit ownership in the formulation of their request for proposal (RFP) despite a fair amount of testimony.)

So, the leading US cities haven’t put their money where their mouth is – and now the vendors are doing likewise. They win the contract for citywide service and then pull back from delivery.

How much investment is required to make this work? What model of ownership makes the most sense? What sort of business model works? What technology choices should we make? What are the purposes of the network? It’s the answers to network purpose that should drive your business/ownership and technology model, not the reverse. That requires commitment to the purposes of the network as opposed to just the idea of “let’s have a network because others have one”.

So, in the cities where the footprints of their pseudo-muni wireless networks are ever-shrinking… how will we cover the gap? It’s time for public attention to turn to community driven models., and it’s time for us to spread the word, spread the model and dispel the FUD.