Silicon Francisco said:
So that will be wireless for San Francisco, the Silicon Valley and our trains. Now we just need wireless for the East Bay, Marin County and our automobiles, and we would be one of the first completely wireless metropolises.
Taipei already has wifi throughout the city.
Taipei's wireless net is slow to catch on
Ken Belson
The New York Times
26 June 2006
Peter Shyu, an engineer, spends most of his day out of the office, so when he needs an Internet connection he often pops into one of the many coffee shops in this city that offer free wireless access. He could use WiFly, the extensive wireless network commissioned by the city government that is the cornerstone of Taipei's ambitious plan to turn itself into an international technology hub. But that would cost him $12.50 a month.
"I'm here because it's free, and if it's free elsewhere, I'll go there, too," said Shyu, hunched over his laptop in an outlet of the Doutor coffee chain. "It's very easy to find free wireless connections."
Despite WiFly's ubiquity with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population just 40,000 of Taipei's 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year. It has lowered that target to 200,000.
That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise technology-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other U.S. cities that are building wireless networks of their own.
Like Taipei, these cities hope to use their new networks to help less affluent people get online and to make their cities more business-friendly. Yet as Taipei has found out, just building a citywide network does not guarantee that people will use it. Most people already have plenty of access to the Internet in their offices and at home, while wireless data services let them get online anywhere using phones, laptops and PDAs.
Like Q-Ware, operators in the United States, Europe and other parts of Asia are eager to build municipal networks. But they are grappling with the high expectations politicians are placing on them. On June 9, MobilePro backed out of plans to develop a wireless network in Sacramento, California, because it said the city wanted it to offer free access and recoup its investment with advertising, not subscriptions, a model that other cities are hoping to adopt. Elsewhere, incumbent carriers have challenged cities' rights to requisition new networks. And many services have had difficulty attracting customers.
"There is a lot of hype about public access," said Craig Settles, a technology consultant in Oakland, California, and author of "Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless." "What's missing from a lot of these discussions is what people are willing to pay for."
Q-Ware's relationship with Taipei has been less contentious, partly because the WiFly network is part of a far broader and highly regarded plan to incorporate the Internet into everything the government does.
The brainchild of Taipei's mayor, Ma Ying-jeou, the CyberCity project was conceived in 1998 as a way to catapult past Seoul, Hong Kong and other Asian capitals that were recasting themselves as cities of the future. Many government agencies now communicate almost exclusively online, saving millions of dollars, and citizens have been given hundreds of thousands of free e-mail accounts and computer lessons. WiFly plays a role, too, by allowing police officers to submit traffic tickets wirelessly, for instance. But making it appeal to the average citizen is another story. Q-Ware, which is part of a conglomerate that, among other things, operates 7- Eleven franchises in Taiwan, has found that consumers will pay subscription fees only if there are original offerings to pull them in. "Content is really key," said Darrell West, a professor of public policy at Brown University. "It's not enough just to have the infrastructure. You have to give people a reason to use the technology."
To that end, Q-Ware has developed P-Walker, a service that will let subscribers with Sony PSP portable game machines log on to WiFly to play online games and download songs and other material.
The company has also developed a low-priced phone service that works with both cellular antennas and WiFly hot spots to transmit calls over the Internet.
Ultimately, Q-Ware expects its network to communicate with more devices that have wireless capabilities, including MP3 players and digital cameras.
"In the beginning, you have to do something to attract people to the service," said Sheng Chang, the vice president of Q-Ware's wireless business group. "We're a wireless city, so if we can't make it here, it can't be made."