Wireless municipal Internet is here, now.

At the beginning of last year we wrote that Tempe, Arizona (pop 160,00) was first city of its size in US to be fully covered by wireless Internet service. Since then things have moved faster than we expected. According to the public radio program On The Media (onthemedia.org), no less than 300 municipalities in the United States are currently moving forward with this new technology, offering great benefits to their residents, businesses and visitors.

City-wide, wireless, high-speed Internet service is usually cheaper than cable or DSL and has no wires and no restrictions. It works in homes, businesses, parks, beaches, and on the road.

It seems that that there are several different ways to set up wireless Internet service. St Cloud Florida built its own wireless system using $3 million of tax money, and now offers Internet service free to all residents. The increase in taxes to pay for the system is more than offset, city officials claim, by the $600 or so per year that town residents save on high speed Internet service.

Champagne-Urbana, Illinois, and Corpus Christi, Texas have also created municipally owned systems, but they are not free. Corpus Christi claims the system has saved a lot of money on the city budget, partly by providing on-the-road Internet access to municipal employees, and partly because they use the net to read meters automatically. They claim to have eliminated 21 meter-reading jobs.

Philadelphia has chosen to license a private provider, Earthlink, to build and operate its system. Comcast and Verizon are not happy about this because Earthlink will offer high speed service for only $22 a month — $9.95 for households in the bottom third of income.

Boston (where close to 60% of the households do not have high speed Internet access) is working on a system that is closest to the most common European system in which the government builds the wireless network and then rents time at wholesale rates to as many Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) as want to use it. This creates competition among providers and keeps rates down.

My daughter, who lives in Ireland, was offered a choice of three wireless ISP’s and ten cable ISP’s. They had different speeds and different rates. She chose the one that was best for her.

In Boston, a non-profit corporation has been set up to raise money and build the system. It will then rent out space to various ISP’s at low, wholesale rates. Regular service will not be free, as it is in St. Cloud – they expect rates to be about $10 to $15 a month — but the Boston group envisions the possibility that one ISP will offer a free, ad-supported service.

The United States now ranks 21st in Internet access and affordability, according to the Department of Commerce, right behind Estonia. And Cape Cod is now falling behind many other cities and towns in the U.S.

Time to stop worrying about the gay marriage amendment and turn our attention to something that can keep us ahead of the curve. I look forward to seeing tourism ads that tell prospective Cape Cod visitors that they can take their laptops to the beach!

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