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MetroFi Announces its Intentions to Abandon the Free Wi-Fi Service Municipal Wireless Arena
MetroFi, an early poster boy for Ad-supported subscriber free Municipal Wireless, is finally giving up that pipe dream.
From reports in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) this past week we learn that one of the primary advocates of Ad-supported subscriber free Municipal Wi-Fi access us seeking to sell the company and simultaneously pulling out of the nine cities it has service in.
So can municipal Wi-Fi work. Yes, actually I think it can. The biggest problem in my mind is that companies like EarthLink and MetroFi so badly managed cities expectations early on in the process with promises of free service to their citizenry, no cost to the city and worst of all, monies paid to the cities in some cases. So when RFPs went out the cities all were expecting this gravy train. And this business case approach proved to be so bad that when deployments turned out to require more radios than estimated (in a lot of cases in my opinion) and cost overruns became more the norm than the exception, there was just not enough pie to slice to sustain operations. Not to mention that virtually nobody's customer acquisition estimates were even close.
Is the message to cities so mucked up that US cities are turned off the idea? That is hard to say, because successful business case Muni Wi-Fi networks probably require some investment from the city in most cases and even if they were open to it, in today's economy, where will they get the money?
Well for the cities of Portland, Oregon, Aurora, Illinois, San Jose, California and a number of other cities the lights will go out in another 30 to 60 days unless somebody wants to buy MetroFi.
Tim Sanders
The Final Mile
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