San Francisco Municipal Wireless

~ the last words ~

San Francisco went to the polls on 6 November 2007 and voted for free citywide wifi, 86,451 to 52,428. The network being voted on had been formally dead since 12 September. Proposition J was non-binding, a declaration of city policy rather than an instruction to anybody, which is the only reason a measure about a canceled project was still sitting on a ballot. Sixty-two percent of the people who showed up said yes to something that no longer had a contractor.

Gavin Newsom raised the idea in 2004, back when municipal wifi was what every American mayor wanted to be photographed announcing. The city put out a request for information in August 2005 to collect public comment, then followed it with a request for proposals. In April 2006 it named a joint bid from EarthLink and Google as the winner. Access points would be bolted to light poles across the city. San Francisco had almost no money of its own to spend on any of it, which is exactly why the plan depended on a company willing to build the thing first and recover the cost later.

The arrangement was split down the middle. EarthLink would build and run the network and sell a 1 Mbit/s connection to anyone who wanted real speed. Google would sit on it as anchor tenant, paying for a free advertising-supported tier at 300 kbit/s so that nobody had to spend anything, with a discounted middle rate for qualifying low-income households. It was a clean piece of structuring and it rested entirely on one company's willingness to keep spending.

The Budget Analyst's Office disliked it and said so in January 2007. Part of the objection was procedural, that the Department of Technology and Information Services had run a closed and slanted procurement. The rest was about the product: 300 kbit/s of wireless-only service was not broadband in 2007, and offering the poorest neighborhoods the weakest connection in the city is a peculiar way to close a digital divide. The office's own analysis argued that a network the city owned outright would serve people better and might cost the user nothing.

I had TTNet broadband in Ankara by 2006, and from here the whole American municipal-wifi argument read like a rich country's problem stated backwards. San Francisco was arguing about who should give the internet away. The question in Turkey was whether the line into your building was any good and what the phone company charged for it, and nobody was waiting on a mayor to mount a radio on a lamppost. The failure underneath is portable, though. A city with no money hands a public utility to a company with a bad balance sheet, and when the company gets into trouble the public thing dies along with it.

~ the record ~

~ why earthlink walked ~

EarthLink was in genuine trouble by the middle of 2007. Its chief executive Rolla Huff went public in August with reservations about municipal wireless deals in general, which in that industry is how a company announces it is leaving without using the word. The economics had stopped working: EarthLink was expected to pay for a citywide build and earn it back through subscriptions, on a network that also carried a permanently free tier somebody else was funding. It walked, and on 12 September 2007 San Francisco formally ended the effort, giving loss of confidence in EarthLink's finances as the reason.

This was not a San Francisco problem. EarthLink had signed municipal wifi contracts in cities across the United States and spent 2007 and 2008 getting out of nearly all of them. The model assumed mesh wifi could blanket a dense city cheaply, and it could not. Radios turned out to be noisier and shorter-ranged in the field than on the map, and every hill and every apartment block pushed the number of nodes needed a little higher, which pushed the cost past what any subscription base was going to cover.

~ what filled the hole ~

Something did end up covering San Francisco in free wifi for a while, and it was not the city. Meraki, a startup partly funded by Google, gave away small routers called the Meraki Mini and let people share their own bandwidth outward to the street. Free the Net grew into the dominant wireless community network in San Francisco and was pushing terabytes a day at its peak. Then Meraki stopped expanding it in 2009 and sold itself to Cisco in 2012, and the free neighborhood network turned into an enterprise networking division.

The Internet Archive ran its own experiment, SFLan, which reached about fifty nodes and then fell to four by October 2007, killed by the physics everyone kept underestimating. Too many wifi signals crowded into the same unlicensed band, and the long line-of-sight links stopped working once the noise floor rose under them. A local ISP called MonkeyBrains started handing out free service in the Mission in 2010. What San Francisco eventually did for itself was quieter than the 2006 plan and considerably more useful: city-owned fiber run into more than forty public housing developments, with free wireless hanging off the end of it. That reaches far fewer people and actually works for them, which is close to the opposite of what everybody was shouting about in 2007.

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