BOB GARFIELD:
Just a year or two ago, business and tech publications were touting municipal Wi-Fi, that is, free or subsidized wireless broadband Internet service for all, coming soon to a city near you. Take a look at the headlines today, and the euphoria has turned to eulogies.

Wired Magazine declared, quote, "an epidemic of municipal Wi-Fi failures," and Slate wrote that citywide Wi-Fi plans had been a, quote, "flop." Tough topography, prickly politics and bad business models have doomed plans, at least for now, from San Francisco to St. Louis.

Marguerite Reardon, however, believes reports of municipal Wi-Fi's death have been exaggerated. She's a senior staff writer for CNET, and she joins me now. Maggie, welcome to On the Media.
MARGUERITE REARDON:
Thanks for having me.

BOB GARFIELD:
First, a quick review. Tell me why some cities have taken it upon themselves to provide broadband service.
MARGUERITE REARDON:
In the early days, a lot of this, sort of, centered around cities looking to use Wi-Fi to do wireless readings of parking meters or of water meters or helping with communication between fire departments and police departments.

So once they started looking into building these networks, they thought, well, we could offer this to our citizens. That's how the whole, sort of, citywide Wi-Fi movement exploded.
BOB GARFIELD:
Now, cities aren't doing this all by themselves. They have contracted with other vendors to actually do the build-outs and to run the services, chief among them, EarthLink. Tell me about these outside entities and exactly how they fit into the picture.
MARGUERITE REARDON:
The cities, a lot of them that were first thinking about this, ran up against a lot of resistance from the big telephone companies and cable companies. They didn't like the idea of cities building their own networks and then competing against them in the broadband arena. So a lot of cities dreamed up this idea of a public/private partnership, and that's where companies like EarthLink come in.

EarthLink puts up the money, builds the network and the city basically agrees to let them use their lamp poles and electrical utility poles to put the access points on there, the radios that will give the signals. So that's kind of how the partnership works. And, in every city, the negotiation and the contract is a little bit different.
BOB GARFIELD:
Now, there was the assumption that if you build it, they will come. But this turns out not necessarily [LAUGHS] to be so. Subscribers have actually been fewer and farther between than anybody anticipated. Why is that?
MARGUERITE REARDON:
It just doesn't make a lot of sense for the consumer. The phone company's already offering DSL. The cable companies are offering cable modem service. And then you have a provider like EarthLink who comes in with a Wi-Fi service that is often slower, probably less reliable, and it's not that much cheaper. It's 20 bucks a month. And you can get Verizon DSL in certain places [LAUGHS] for 15 dollars a month.
BOB GARFIELD:
Maggie, who's doing it right?

MARGUERITE REARDON:
We're seeing some early signs of success. I mean -- and I hope this doesn't [LAUGHS] come back to bite me in a couple of years -- but, you know, Philadelphia seems to be doing a pretty good job. Their main focus and their main goal was to bridge the digital divide, and I think they've done a pretty good job with that. They created a non-profit group, Wireless Philadelphia that finds the funding, so EarthLink is still making some money and Wireless Philadelphia is getting grants from other places to fund this.

And they're also subsidizing the cost of getting people the equipment -- laptops and desktops and things that they're going to need to be able to access the broadband. They're providing training. It's a real community effort.

And they're also getting other parts of the city involved. For example, Drexel University is one of the largest users of the network now, and they're providing service for their students and faculty. And that seems to be a great partnership. But, you know, it's still early days, so it's hard to say.
BOB GARFIELD:
There is something called an anchor tenant, which sounds to me like a lease at the mall to a big department store. How do anchor tenants fit into the economics of municipal Wi-Fi?
MARGUERITE REARDON:
Well, at the end of the day, somebody has to pay for the network. So it's really helpful if you can have a big entity, like a city, Corpus Christi or even Houston, who say, you know, we are committed, and we'll have a contract here that says that we're going to use X million dollars’ worth of service per year to provide Wi-Fi to our police department or even just to connect our different municipal buildings together. And that really gives a company like EarthLink some safety where they can say, okay, we know this much is coming in. Then they can start building out services to more citizens or they can expand into businesses.
BOB GARFIELD:
Maggie, there's this truism that governments can't do what the private sector could do much more efficiently, especially when there is competition in play. And there's certainly a lot of competition for the broadband marketplace. The cable companies and the telecoms are at each other's throats constantly trying to get their wires into your home.

Is it possible that this is just not a job for a municipality, that they should just step back and wait for the market to take care of itself?
MARGUERITE REARDON:
We have cities building parks. We have cities that build subway lines, utilities. And I think we could think of communications in the same way. The real problem is, and the reason why we're seeing so many failures now, is we haven't seen the commitment from cities.

Why does every [LAUGHS] citizen need this network, right? Why does every citizen need electricity or running water or subways? I mean, if you want your city to have it, you've got to step up to the plate and either make it a good sell to the private company that's going to come in and build it or you have to put up some money yourself.
BOB GARFIELD:
Maggie, thank you.
MARGUERITE REARDON:
Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:
Marguerite Reardon is a senior staff writer for cnet.com.