AP (via Yahoo) gives us the dark side of municipal wireless looking at potential failures throughout the US.

Cities struggle with wireless Internet

This is laced with hooie. Most of it is very circumstantial evidence that municipal wireless probably won’t work. It’s really too early to tell.

They focus most of their analysis on Lompoc, CA which is building a publicly-owned system. Lompoc only recently discovered that the wireless signal can’t penetrate stucco with it’s embedded wire mesh. They should have called US Internet here in Minneapolis– they knew and that’s why their bandwidth is only guaranteed with a repeater to strengthen the signal both ways. The device will cost $80 and can be rented for $5/month. Lots cheaper than the $150 for such a device mentioned in the article.

Here’s a quote:

Because systems are just coming online, it’s premature to say how many or which ones will fail under current operating plans, but the early signs are troubling.

It’s premature but let’s look at every single problem we can find with these deployments to make it sound bad. They focus on publicly-owned systems.

Minneapolis doesn’t get mentioned (as usual). Maybe it’s because our deployment seems to be going smoothly.