A Stitch in Haste

A surprising and heartening development in the municipal wi-fi mania. Philadelphia, one of the first cities to propose "free" (i.e., taxpayer-subsidized) municipal wi-fi Internet access, has ended up accepting an offer from a private company to provide the service at no taxpayer cost:

Under the terms of the EarthLink proposal, no city or taxpayer dollars will be used to fund the project. EarthLink will finance, build, and manage the wireless network, and share revenue with the city's Wireless Philadelphia initiative.
...
EarthLink's proposal to pay for the cost of building the network was among the major reasons the city selected the provider, Neff said. The city's request for proposals did not require that the Wi-Fi vendor pay for the cost of building the network; the city had considering using bonds or private funding to allow Wireless Philadelphia to pay for construction, she said.

To review: If municipal wi-fi is such a neat-o idea that is so highly sought by so many people, then private companies will tend to want to offer it and will tend to be able to do so profitably. Taxpayers need not have anything to do with it. This is entirely as it should be (ignoring for now the issue of government-granted monopolies, which is a separate question altogether).

Bottom line: If you come, they will build it.