I work for a city that tried to do a Wi-Fi project, and we had people coming to City Council meetings arguing the first two points, exactly. Luckily, we had one Councilmember who was tech-savvy (a rarity), and he called BS on them, amazingly. In a community that trips over itself to cater to the paranoid, that was impressive.
Ultimately, we were undone by 1. taking WAY too long to make a move 2. companies bailing on offering the service 3. tying our Wi-Fi project to several other communities. We had an attractive market (high-density, lots of students, very technical and educated community), but we decided to work with other local governments whose markets weren't as attractive. And that led to 1.5 years of talking and meeting and getting Intergovernmental Agreements signed and vetted by everyone's lawyers, etc. By the time all that was done, all of the companies who had been chomping at the bit to offer it had bailed and/or failed. 4. several other local communities getting their Wi-Fi networks up and running and then failing to get enough people interested to make them sustainable. Even though it probably still would have worked well here, other local failures made it look pretty shaky.
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I work for a city that tried to do a Wi-Fi project, and we had people coming to City Council meetings arguing the first two points, exactly. Luckily, we had one Councilmember who was tech-savvy (a rarity), and he called BS on them, amazingly. In a community that trips over itself to cater to the paranoid, that was impressive.
Ultimately, we were undone by
1. taking WAY too long to make a move
2. companies bailing on offering the service
3. tying our Wi-Fi project to several other communities. We had an attractive market (high-density, lots of students, very technical and educated community), but we decided to work with other local governments whose markets weren't as attractive. And that led to 1.5 years of talking and meeting and getting Intergovernmental Agreements signed and vetted by everyone's lawyers, etc. By the time all that was done, all of the companies who had been chomping at the bit to offer it had bailed and/or failed.
4. several other local communities getting their Wi-Fi networks up and running and then failing to get enough people interested to make them sustainable. Even though it probably still would have worked well here, other local failures made it look pretty shaky.