Why Did Philadelphia Muni Wi-Fi Stumble?

The New American Foundation, a Washington, D.C. policy advocate, argues in a new report that the Philadelphia municipal Wi-Fi effort has stumbled because it opted for private operation of the network, instead of sticking with a originally-recommended non-profit model that also avoided any use of public tax dollars. The report is critical of the decision to award a construction and operation contact to EarthLink.

"An executive committee, set up by the mayor’s office and tasked to study Philadelphia’s options for building a municipal wireless network, assessed
the city’s situation and recommended nonprofit ownership of the network," the report says. But Wireless Philadelphia disregarded those recommendations," the report notes.

"Instead, WP yielded to political pressure when it accepted EarthLink’s bid to own and operate the network."

As a result, the study argues, "WP has underperformed because it de-prioritized public input and constituent interests." The report argues that WP would have been more effective if it had assumed ownership of the network."

I don't know about that. Is it not obvious that a municipal network, even one operated as a non-profit affair, requires a resource generation mechanism? No matter what entity had been chosen to build and operate the network, some way to support construction and operation is necessary, and given the restriction on tax support, some other resource would have to have been available. Donations, grants, commercial fees or some other way of securing support is necessary.

So is it reasonable to assume that even a non-profit approach would have worked? Most observers of the municipal Wi-Fi scene now agree that the resource model is a stumbling block.That is to say, people might very well want to have free or cheap access. But there does not seem to be a sufficient resource input model to support that, if taxes cannot be used.

No approach to building and operating a network can be successful if scores of millions of dollars cannot be raised to construct the network. The legal structure of the entity does not logically seem to be the key impediment here. If tax dollars are not available, some other means of securing the inputs obviously is required. The report contains no suggestion of what that mechanism might otherwise have been. And that, it seems to me, is the big stumbling block. To the extent a non-profit entity had been chosen, what would that entity have been able to do in this regard?