Is Public WiFi Sustainable?
November 6, 2008 by Rico Mossesgeld
Filed under Ramblings of a Gadget Geek, Services
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.
Interesting. You’ve just described what happened to ATT’s 3G network got clobbered by iPhones, and now that its all patched here comes the 3G Blackberry Bold! How long until ATT has to patch it up again? No wonder they are giving free wifi to these phones now, and just bught up a bunch more wifi hotspots. They’ve gotta get more of these devices onton wifi and off their 3G cellular since they obviously can’t keep up!
Wrong, u shld have proper experience with Singapore’s Wireless@sg service b4 posting hearsay from a passerby who probably is a local spoilt with state of the art broadband svc at home and mobile broadband on the move. Yes, almost everybody has paid-for broadband in Singapore nowadays.
As with all free public goods/svcs, its as much about expectations too. Proper management prevents abuse by free riders doing major downloads. Try doing P2P or other downloads and u will get locked out. Its all about network management.
With reasonable expectations, i.e. essential surfing and emailing etc., the service is perfectly usable. Which is what most legit users need and want when on the move and away from home/office. I enjoy being able to kill time while out and about waiting for/meeting friends.
Ask tourists and others who need to make hotel/airline bookings online and u’ll see how critically important it is.
Whenever I travel to other countries and need internet access desperately, I wish I was in Singapore.
BTW, this was sent using Singapore’s free public Wifi svc at a neighbourhood McDonald’s.