"Nation's first" citywide free Wi-Fi network folds

The city of St. Cloud, Florida may not have the name recognition of bigger burgs, but it does have one (somewhat arguable) claim to fame, as the nation's first community to give city-wide wireless Internet access to all of its residents, for free.

That 2006 project has been hailed as a success, covering 15 square miles of the city and providing Wi-Fi to its 32,000 citizens. But now those days have come to an end, as St. Cloud is boarding up the service.

Why didn't it make it? For starters, the city says that no one was using the network, with just 2,500 devices a day connecting to the Wi-Fi grid. But really it's the massive investment in the system that really must have raised eyebrows, particularly in these trying economic times. The original $2.6 million investment is gone, but the city had also been spending $600,000 a year on the network for maintenance to keep it up and running. That's a gargantuan investment in servicing the data needs (likely intermittent at that) of a mere 2,500 people a day.

There's also the not-so-little issue of the problem of citizens complaining that the system just didn't work.

With the city facing a $1.3 million budget shortfall, pulling the plug on the network must have been an easy call, however sad it is to see one of the few remaining municipal Wi-Fi networks in the nation go dark. Muni Wi-Fi, once one of the brightest promises of our connected society, is now little more than a footnote in the big book of high-tech disasters. Too expensive to install and maintain, slow and buggy as can be, and ignored by the populace, these plans just seem to have no avenue for success.

St. Cloud isn't totally giving up on the network: It's keeping part of the wireless grid alive for use by the city for municipal business. If the City Council votes, it could eventually be reopened to the public. Yeah, that'll happen.