I outlined many issues I foresee with Portland's upcoming "free wifi" initiative that will likely cause it to fail, but the picture is even bleaker if it succeeds.

Consider this: the target speeds for the free Wifi are 1Mb/s down, 256Kb/s up. These speeds barely qualify as broadband. Further, these are undoubtedly "optimal" speeds, i.e. the speeds you'll never see in practice. Now consider that the majority of people will probably be willing to settle for these speeds in exchange for the low cost (i.e. hidden in your taxes) and expected ubiquity. What will this mean for existing broadband providers? Well, most likely it will mean drastically reduced customer bases and higher rates for those who remain with them. That means if you don't want the sorry-ass bandwidth the city will provide, you'd better be prepared to shell out.

This is where it gets even more interesting: why aren't we hearing screams of protest from Verizon and Qwest? This service seems to appeal directly to their customer base (DSL users) which would normally have them lobbying and buying off politicians by now. So why are they so silent? Is it because they expect that the free Wifi won't be fast enough to support technologies like VOIP and that VOIP is more of a threat to their revenue stream than the lost revenue from DSL customers? Perhaps. There's really no way of knowing at this point, but the telecom's silence on the matter is certainly curious.

Anyway, it seems pretty obvious that no matter what the outcome, free Wifi is going to have a negative impact on the deployment of true broadband (> 5Mb/s) in our area and that's good for no one.