Enjoy free municipal Wi-Fi while you can, says Marketwatch's John C. Dvorak, because it ain't gonna last. He argues that cash-strapped cities like San Francisco sooner or later have to succumb to the
temptation to charge for Internet services--even if the private companies that install them have no interest in making money. If there's no direct (or indirect) economic benefit for the city, it
simply does not make sense to give away free Wi-Fi, he says. Even the myriad coffee shops giving away free Wi-Fi in San Francisco do so for a reason: to encourage customers to stay longer so they'll
buy more products. Dvorak says free Wi-Fi will probably go the way of free parking (there is no free parking), because it will always be looked at as a lost revenue stream with very little benefit to
anyone except maybe Google, who thinks more Internet users means more traffic for them. Vendors will swoop in and start circling municipal governments offering to take over the system and split the
revenue. Add to that the pressure from cable and telcom companies and smaller ISPs, whose businesses will be heavily strapped from the competition. Oh yeah, and what about the resulting free cell
phone service once everyone figures out they can just use a VoIP provider? Dvorak says all this adds up to too many powerful companies interested in seeing free Wi-Fi fall, and so it will.
Read the whole story at Marketwatch »
