Chicago Decides Against Citywide Wi-Fi

In a sure sign that the fervor behind municipal Wi-Fi is cooling rapidly, the city of Chicago announced Tuesday that it was canceling its plans to blanket the city with wireless Internet.

The city says it failed to reach an agreement with either AT&T or EarthLink, the two companies vying for the contract. Chicago first announced that it was considering citywide Wi-Fi early last year.

However, negotiations apparently didn't go as well as planned, The Chicago Tribune reported, and recent moves by EarthLink that it may be pulling out of the municipal Wi-Fi business probably contributed to the city's decision to pull the plug.

One of the main points of contention was the fact that city officials were unwilling to pay the companies to install the network. Instead, the city would have provided the infrastructure.

As good as it sounded, municipal Wi-Fi is not getting results. In many locations, the number of signups are only in the hundreds, and it cost millions of dollars to build up the networks. Add to this the fact that wired high-speed Internet like cable and DSL is available for the same price, and there isn't much reason for people to sign up anymore.

One Chicago official told the Tribune that the city did not want to lead the way when it came to city Wi-Fi. Instead, officials had much more interest in seeing what happened in other cities. With the recent news on the subject, Chicago's announcement isn't all that surprising.