Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

In the ongoing story of Minneapolis providing citywide wifi access:

“Minneapolis officials have chosen an 11-year-old Minnetonka Internet service provider with some Wi-Fi experience to build a citywide wireless network. US Internet would build and operate the roughly $20 million Minneapolis Wi-Fi network and would offer consumers high-speed Internet service for $20 a month.”

…

“Under the proposed deal, the network would blanket the city with signals that could be received in 95 percent of outdoor locations and 90 percent of indoor locations.”

Minneapolis announced yesterday that they have selected US Internet to build out the city’s offering. I think this is going to be a great step forward for offering more Internet based mobile services. If you know that you can get reliable Internet service anywhere in the city, it opens up a whole set of services that you wouldn’t have thought of using before, mainly location based services. I’m most excited for the Skype possibilities.

Although I think this is a great move on the part of the city, I still won’t be signing up anytime soon, for a few reasons:

• I can’t justify paying $20 a month for wifi in a city that I neither live in (St. Paul), nor work in (Golden Valley).
• The bandwidth (1MB/second) doesn’t compare to cable service (although this might not matter for such uses as a Skype phone or other mobile services, but I wouldn’t recommend running a server on this connection )
• I don’t have a Skype wifi phone to take advantage of the service

I’m more excited about this project because I believe there will be a tipping point where many cities will begin to offer wifi, making it ubiquitous, but the other cities will need to see it work for early adopters like Minneapolis before they will take the plunge.

It’s also funny to see Qwest do its best to run the project aground