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SF Muni Wireless: Not Dead But Expiring

In the past I have angered Bay Area politicians and activists by "making fun" (as one miffed commenter put it) of the ongoing fiasco that the San Francisco municipal wireless effort has become. I'm afraid I'm about to do so again.

Don't get me wrong: I love San Francisco. I worked there (for the late lamented Industry Standard) during the dot-com gold rush, and I've spent many vague evenings enjoying the delights of the city's fabled demi-monde. But the executives at EarthLink and Google who thought they could reach an economically viable deal to build a free Wi-Fi network in San Francisco must have been smoking some of the aromatic products available in the Haight-Asbury district.

This, after all, is the city that twice elected Willie Brown, as corrupt as any prominent U.S. politician to arise since the Tammany Hall days, as its mayor. This is the city that provided the cradle of the radical labor movement in this country. This is the home of many grandiose development schemes over the years, including the Ocean Shore Electric Railroad, which was designed to run from San Francisco to Santa Cruz. Construction on the railway was started in 1905 and was never fully completed. The line was abandoned in 1923.

Now it looks as if the EarthLink/Google free Wi-Fi project may suffer a similar fate before a single access point gets hung. Faced with demands from the city for adjustments to its original contract, EarthLink is tap dancing and may back out of the project altogether. "I give it another four to six weeks before the whole deal is over," predicts Glenn Fleishman on Wi-Fi Networking News.

Meanwhile, in a headline-grab worthy of his predecessor Willie Brown, Mayor Gavin Newsom has put the free-Wi-Fi concept on the ballot in the form of a nonbinding resolution. "This," notes Craig Settles, municipal networking consultant and author of Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless (Hudson House Publishing; 2006), "is akin to asking voters if they support world peace."

Because the San Francisco deal was one of the earliest and most ballyhooed of the muni-Wi-Fi efforts, its demise is more than an object of ridicule: it could help derail the whole nascent business of Wi-Fi, which has already suffered plenty of snafus and setbacks.

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