Proliferation and Implications of Municipal WI-FI

Municipal WIFI
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Municipal WI-FI
In the wake of impressive rise of Wi-Fi in the last decade, a new twist has come up: there has been an increasing number of municipal governments deploying Wi-Fi networks not only in the United States, but also abroad. This paper provides a discussion as to whether or not municipal Wi-Fi should continue to be pursued, and if this should be left to the government sector, the private sector or both sectors. Thesis: Municipal Wi-Fi should continue to be pursued, and this should be left to both the private and government sector jointly. Wi-Fi networks would offer access to the underserved people within the city/municipality, and create cost-savings for the municipality/city.
There are 2 major forces which drive the proliferation of municipal Wi-Fi deployment. First, with low-cost, mass-produced unlicensed wireless technology, many municipalities and cities across the United States have easy access to the means. It is of note that Wi-Fi networks are rather cheap to both deploy and operate, and municipalities capitalize on city assets for instance urban furniture and street lights which perfect sites for antenna (Duncan, 2009). Second, governments of municipalities point out an increasing list of reasons such as the following: to entice business organizations to move to their city centers, to aid municipalities offer internet connectivity for workers of the municipality, and to ensure that the underserved people have access to the internet (Bar & Park, 2010).
Municipal-wide networks are integral to the municipal governments. Local governments need broadband/Wi-Fi networks in order to deliver services to their citizens and support their internal operations. Networks are important for local governments in providing services such as meter monitoring, utility monitoring, code enforcement, fire or police protection, and municipalities operate internal networks in order to support their workers in all these tasks, in addition to inter-governmental communications (Duncan, 2009). Wi-Fi technology will allow them to deploy those networks cheaply and to provide better network coverage across urban areas, and help in enhancing government work performance and reduce the cost of providing those services.
Moreover, municipalities are increasingly eager to offer on-line services to businesses and citizens such as access to government meetings, building permit applications and access to municipal databases for instance crime statistics and property information, as well as on-line participation in civic debate. Furthermore, municipal Wi-Fi will offer inexpensive and universal broadband internet access to their citizens, thereby bridging the digital divide (Bar & Park, 2010).
Municipal Wi-Fi – run and operated through public-private partnership, and which is free or low cost – should continue to be pursued. To complement th...