The city of Spokane has shelved plans to enlarge greatly a broadband wireless-communication network that covers a roughly 100-block area of downtown.


Right now I dont see that growing a lot, says Garv Brakel, the citys director of management-information services. It was a great concept, and if money was falling out of trees, we would have been going gangbusters.


That hasnt occurred, though, and Spokane isnt alone. San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, and numerous other cities across the country have delayed or abandoned plans to offer low-cost or free wireless Internet access due to high system-installation expenses and other complications.


The goal was to take advantage of the technology known as wireless fidelity, or Wi-Fi, which uses unlicensed radio spectrum to enable high-speed data transmission to computers and other devices. The technology is being adopted widely across the U.S. for home and small-business uses, as well as in the downtown grid here known as the SpokaneHotZone, but plans to create large municipal Wi-Fi networks have bogged down, due partly to lack of funding and demand.


Greg Green, CEO of Spokane-based OneEighty Networks Inc., which provides the broadband service for the downtown network, says the once-enticing notion of offering Wi-Fi on a citywide scale has faded, here and elsewhere, partly because of unrealistic expectations.


Broadband service providers and municipalities have struggled to reach agreements that would assure the service providers would garner enough revenue to cover their costs of installing the expensive networks, he says.


It was this very sexy product, Green says, and now its getting into who owns it, who owns the infrastructure, who manages it. It went from being this in, chic thing to, Whoa, were in this to make a buck, and we just dont see how it pencils out.


Unlike some other cities that have installed or hoped to install Wi-Fi systems for broad public use, the network expansion that Spokane was considering most recently was to be used just by public-safety agencies.


It was envisioned that for mobile fire, police, and medical personnel, the system would speed up tasks such as accessing data and getting reports approved from field locations.


In a federal funding request three years ago, the city asserted that the technology has immeasurable potential in hostage situations, missing children, chemical spills, fires, and traffic collisions to name a few.


Although there was discussion earlier of creating a dual-use, citywide network that would include a secure public-safety side and a general consumer side, officials said the ultimate decision was to leave out the latter piece of it because it couldnt be justified fiscally.


In smaller applications, as most users of wireless devices are well aware, the Wi-Fi technology creates whats known as a hot spot, an area with a typical range of up to several hundred feet in which people can access the Internet.


The public-safety portion of the network expansion plan spearheaded by the city of Spokane called for installing the equipment needed to create hot spots at several key locations throughout the metropolitan area, then later providing fill-in coverage along major transportation corridors.


Brakel says, though, that among those, the only hot spot set up over the last two and a half years is one encompassing the Spokane County Courthouse, at 1116 W. Broadway, the adjoining public-safety building, and nearby city and county garages.


Joel Hobson, who had been the citys network services manager and was heavily involved in the Wi-Fi network expansion effort, left that position in the spring of 2006 and his position wasnt refilled, as the city decided to reorganize that department, Brakel says.


It was time to stop and look at what we really wanted to do, he says, adding that, The primary reason is I believe the technology is about to change.


A newly emerging technology called WiMAX potentially could enable the city to create a large municipal wireless network at a much lower cost than current technology because of its superior range, he says.


Currently, to do it right, you need at least 40 nodes per square mile, at a typical cost of $3,000 or more per node, Brakel says.


The city of Spokane encompasses about 58 square miles, which means the total cost of such a wireless network would be more than $6.9 million, based on Brakels figures.


The decision two years ago by Vivato Inc. to close its doors, then sell its assets was an additional obstacle to expansion of the Wi-Fi network here, Brakel says. That Portland-based company, which had research and manufacturing operations in Spokane Valley, developed and built the Wi-Fi base stations on which the downtown wireless network here depends.


Vivatos assets were acquired by an investor group in June of last year, and the reformed Vivato Networks reestablished a contract-manufacturing arrangement with Servatron Inc., of Spokane Valley, five months later, according to the Vivato Web site. Earlier this month, Catcher Holdings Inc., a Leesburg, Va.-based maker of ruggedized, handheld computers, announced that it had acquired Vivato in a stock trade.


The citys push to establish a citywide hot zone was inspired heavily by the efforts of Vivato, OneEighty Networks, and a couple of other companies that had been working with it to develop and steadily improve the Wi-Fi system in the citys core, which is available free to the public.


Brakel notes that the city has established small hot zones at its fire stations and libraries, and he says, Well continue where it makes sense to create them on a similarly limited scale. He says the city might take another look at a citywide wireless network once the WiMAX technology has matured a bit and more is known about it.


A lingering question, though, he says, is whether there will be enough public demand for a citywide wireless system to warrant installing it.


Of the downtown hot zone, he says, I dont know that our everyday citizens are using it. Certainly its a convenience for a businessperson coming in from out of town (who has wireless devices they want to be able to use).


The network has value for those people and for certain government-related uses, and less value to anyone else, he contends.


Nationwide, builders and operators of public Wi-Fi systems have found that the networks required more nodes than expected, boosting their cost, and that residents havent turned out in large numbers to subscribe to them, according to published reports. In San Francisco, protecting the privacy of network users also became a controversial issue.


Adding fresh doubt to the viability of large-scale municipal Wi-Fi projects has been the struggles of EarthLink Inc., a traditional dial-up Internet service provider that had morphed into one of the muni-wireless industrys biggest champions and installers.


After posting a $79.4 million third-quarter loss, EarthLink announced last month that it will stop making major investments in such systems and is considering strategic alternatives for its municipal-wireless business, signaling that it may be willing to sell that portion of its operations.


Contact Kim Crompton at (509) 344-1263 or via e-mail at [email protected].