Is Public WiFi Sustainable?

On a recent trip to Singapore, I was taken aback when a random Chinese guy approached me. He realized, through casual observation, that I was trying to access the public WiFi network, which was apparently accessible throughout the city. “Don’t bother”, he said with a thick accent, “it’s really slow, and good luck connecting”

That made me wonder: is free public WiFi sustainable? No doubt, it can be a great help for an increasingly net-savvy populace, and especially me right now, as I compose a post for this blog (offline on E71) while waiting for a my girlfriend. Public and free WiFi would’ve allowed to go online with my laptop, and write the post right on this blog’s admin.

But since connectivity is easily maximized (everyone’s into downloading nowadays), free WiFi isn’t sustainable. Whether supported by government money, advertisements, or even charity. That’s because as more people discover a “need” to be online on a regular basis, they start becoming addicts for connectivity. Imagine how attractive free WiFi is to this new breed of cravers.

So usage multiplies tremendously. Some people even try maximizing their of the access, selfishly grabbing as much bandwidth as possible. Even a relatively small percentage of users doing this will be enough to bring the network to its knees, as the power users crowd out the casual ones.

So the service provider starts increasing its capacity, hoping that economies of scale will keep the costs down, or even make the venture profitable. But as the user base grows, more power users will rise to make up the slack. The vicious cycle will continue until the service provider cannot expand, due to infrastructure limitations or a simple lack of cash.

This is apparently what happened in Singapore. The provider stopped expanding for practical reasons, leaving a mostly unworkable network, maintained at a significant cost. Worse, if the free net access is provided by the government, doesn’t that represent a heavy financial burden on the national budget? Guess how governments try to raise more cash? That’s right: more taxes.

The dream of free WiFi is a great one, because it theoretically allows anyone to experience the wonders of the net. But is providing a sustainable? For the reasons discussed above, I don’t think so.