Why Municipally Provided Wifi Must Never Be Allowed
I have twice now had to defend an unpopular premise – that local governments should not provide free wifi to residents and visitors. A recent thread on the Open Rights Group discussion list almost got pretty out of hand between a few people who thought it was dangerous for the government to be providing IP services, and the majority who wanted it.
To provide “free” wifi to residents, a council must spend our money on many more items than simply wifi access points located in strategic points around the city. They need to provide onward connectivity (expensive), operational support, technical support, security systems, subscriptions to professional groups such as the IWF, monitoring and maintenance and much more. The council can’t afford to fix the pot-holes on my road, despite billing me each April on the promise of doing just that, so where will the money come from in order to pay or this infrastructure?
I also do not want the council competing with my local ISP. Government is not designed to compete with private enterprises. Turfing council tax paying employees out of work by competing with their employers is surely counter-productive.
I also don’t want the general public to be led to believe that internet access is free to provide. Its bad enough that Carphone Warehouse, Orange, and other companies are trying to their best to leave customers of ‘free’ broadband services with that theory without my local government joining in.
Some people believe that free municipal wifi could be a positive externality achieved when a city is ‘wifi’d’ for public sector employees to use when doing their job. I would love to see any cost/benefit analysis that demonstrated that the applications that drive our public sector are cheaper to run over ubiquitous wifi rather than store-and-forward messaging systems that take advantage of wifi at strategic points or 3G data connectivity. I then want to see the figures that suggest opening up a private local government network for public use wont cost any more money.
Then followed the argument that if local government can provide street-lights, then why shouldn’t they provide wifi using the same rationale. The problem with this logic is that streetlights and IP connectivity are not similar enough to compare. Street lighting is a public good; in economic terms, that means that we all are required to pay for it and we all get it, irrespective of our purchase preferences as free economic agents. People wouldn’t ‘buy’ street lighting in normal circumstances, even though there is a compelling reason to deploy it. Internet connectivity is not like this, where IP is useful, it is already widely deployed.
Firms need to fight in order to be the best at providing services, so that they can feed innovation and value. Consumers need to choose which service meets their needs the best. I would wager that you demand very different things from your domestic internet connection than I do. If I had to buy SheffieldCityBroadband (which I do have to buy, if I get taxed for its provision – tax is of course demanding money with menaces), it probably wont do what I need.
Free wifi isn’t free. Someone has to pay. And if that someone is the taxpayer, then why can’t we just pay “the best” private company in our area to provide the service. Perhaps I will be lucky and get two providers to fight it out to be the best!
Lastly, the concept of buying internet access from the Government is extremely frightening to me. Check out the content blocking section of the LINX Public Affairs site if you want some evidence that the government are desperate to filter our internet connections. If everyone buys their state-IP the government have a simple place to block our content!
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