Philadelphia Dreams of Being World's Biggest Wi-Fi Hot Spot (September 4, 2004)

According to the Associated Press's Joseph Kaczmarek, the possibility of listening to Internet radio in your car could become a reality in San Diego soon after Philadephia's plans to become the first major city in the U.S. to offer the world's largest Internet Wi-Fi hot spot come true.

How are you listening to dfsxradio.com's 24 hours of comedy? In your home, sitting on a chair? How about listening to dfsxradio.com on your portable laptop in your car? With your portable computer accessing Wi-Fi while you drive, it's possible that you can escape Top 40 Hell in favor of listening to music from over 10,000 Internet radio stations and thousands of broadcast stations piping their signals through the Internet.

If the Wi-Fi connection is free, and the city of Philadelphia can pay a million dollars a year to cover some 135 square miles of it, that could literally free your computer from paid services such as DSL (which is LSD spelled backwards), Cable, even dial-up, courtesy of the tax payer.

This also means, translated for the radio angle, that local radio could be in far serious more trouble than they think. If 200 satellite radio stations (some subscribe to both XM and Sirius) isn't making much of a dent in the listening base of local radio, free Wi-Fi and portable computers tuning in to streaming music will cause a serious dip in the total number of people listening to local radio.

The ambitious plan for Philadelphia would involve placing thousands of small transmitters around the city – probably atop lampposts. Each of these wireless hot spots would be capable of communicating with the Wi-Fi network cards that now come standard with many computers.

Once completed, the $10 million network would deliver broadband Internet almost anywhere radio waves can travel – including poor neighborhoods where high-speed Internet access is now rare.

The city would likely offer the service either for free, or at costs far lower than the $35 to $60 a month charged for broadband delivered over telephone and cable TV lines, said the city's chief information officer, Dianah Neff.

"If you're out on your front porch with a laptop, you could dial in, register at no charge, and be able to access a high-speed connection," Neff said. "It's a technology whose time is here."

If the plan becomes a reality, Philadelphia would leap to the forefront of a growing number of cities already offering or mulling a wireless broadband network for their residents, workers and guests.

Other cities are slowly getting into the act, though they are paid services that cost less than dial-up for AOL and MSN. Chaska Minnesota started offering citywide Wi-FI for $16 a month covering 13 square miles. Cleveland offers Wi-Fi for free (by taxpayers, naturally) covering three districts.

Free citywide Internet Wi-Fi access could, aside of causing monetary losses for cable and DSL providers, would also be a threat to other wireless Internet services such as Ricochet and Verizon Communications Inc. Cox, Time Warner, and other cable systerms spent literally billions of dollars on their broadband cable services, with no word whether they have since recouped their investments in the technology to deliver all the new broadband services since Cox began introducing it in 1997. The local phone companies such as SBC and others offering DSL could be hurt the most when fed-up subscribers, once their contracts run out, leave them for other Internet services and free Wi-Fi could be their next destination. Verizon Communications also invested heavily upgrading their wireless frequencies to offer high-speed Internet connections for a fee.

A free service might also hurt Verizon's wireless business, which is spending $1 billion to upgrade its network with a technology that will enable speedier Web access for laptops and mobile phones.

The problem with free Intenet services by the city is, for one thing, the taxpayers are paying for the service, whether they use it or prefer to use a paid provider for their Internet services. Let's see how fast the cities can handle problems such as power outages and other matters with their taxpayer-supported free Internet service. The paid providers have a staff ready to help and their engineers and technicians available to answer whatever probems crop up in their Internet networks.

Another problem: people may expect their high-speed Internet service for free or on the cheap if the cities begin offering the service. The dial-up providers may go out of business. The DSL companies run by the phone companies may cease doing business. The cable providers may call it quits as far as Internet goes. Verizon and Ricochet may get out of the wireless Internet business.

Thanks to surging demand, the cost of the Wi-Fi hot spots and Wi-Fi computer cards have fallen sharply in recent years. At the same time, a glut of capacity on wired networks built during the technology boom has made it cheaper to deliver Web traffic to and from Wi-Fi hot spots.

Neff, for example, estimated it would cost Philadelphia just $1.5 million a year to maintain the system.

The main drawback to Wi-Fi is that the signal can only travel several hundred feet. But the "wireless mesh" technology being considered by Philadelphia and other cities essentially joins those individual hot spots into a network to provide service across entire neighborhoods.