Philadelphia’s proposed municipal Wi-Fi network would cost upwards of $60,000 per square mile to implement, plus millions per year to maintain. I doubt that the Wi-Fi network will be a priority for the city when times get tough and the budget is short by a few million dollars. Failure to adequately fund the system could leave the city with unreliable wireless service once private wireless providers have been crowded out.

The issue isn't wi-fi -- hell, I assume that another new technology will soon come along that will deliver high spseed internet access faster and cheaper -- but how we are going to provide high speed internet access to the widest number of folks.

Back in the day, we subsidized "plain old telphone service" for poor people and old ladies so that everyone could have a phone and be a part of the modern era. It was called universal service.

Now if we still all believe in "starting gate equality", will not high speed info access be the point of entry?

I would say so, and to rely on comcast or verizon to make it cheap for folks is as naive as some of the early Esther Dyson-Newt Gingrich-Wired magna carta libertarian light chatter from 1995.

At the same time that you feel we need allow for 'fair competition' and 'market rate stabilization', the telcos are being incentivized with tax money ($36 m alone for Alabama) to deploy high speed rural dsl, etc. (see http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg&section=News&storyid=110418). We have long passed the point where the market determined the fair price of information - these bills aren't written by public servants, they are written by lobbyists for industry.

When will we finally acknowledge that certain things belong to 'the people'?
Our airwaves for instance. Our public land (e.g., ANWR, whose oil is going into private hands, for private profit). Water (yes, all of it), and other things that we collectively need...

On a societal level, in the 21st century, the information commons should be a part of that defensible system of public interest accessibility.

And I would add, government is only a threat until you remember that the government is US. If we held them accountable for their actions, we'd realize that ownership of water, utilities, and wi-fi makes a hell of a lot more sense than ownership of the local ballpark.

Suzanne Stenson O'Brien

Start providing (or perhaps pressuring PC companies into providing) cheap - if not free laptops?

If you don't think that the companies in the marketplace are making highspeed access cheap for consumers now - I'm not sure we can even get to the point of addressing the question I posed in the post.

I know Mike mentioned this in his original post, but I thought y'all would be interested in this recent CNN.com story on how easy it is to hack into info viewed, emailed, and so forth, via wireless connections.

Whether or not government-sponsored wifi comes to fruition everywhere, the fact that we're moving towards an increasingly wireless world gives these security concerns an even broader relevance.