Whole cities as Internet hotspots? The Wifi revolution spreads.(Commentary)

Philadelphia is debating making all 134 square miles of the city the world's largest wireless hotspot. Boston, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, and other cities are considering parallel moves. In Europe, the firm HotSpot Amsterdam is set to go citywide in the Dutch capital soon.

A OneCleveland campaign, led by Case Western Reserve University, boasts of the thousands of users already logged cost-free onto rapid broadband Internet service through the 4,000 wireless transmitters recently installed in the University Circle and Midtown districts and along the lakefront.

From Corpus Christi, Texas, to the Silicon Valley, at least 50 cities are actively exploring their own versions of remarkably inexpensive communitywide transmitter nets, mounted every few hundred feet on utility poles and light posts. The new technology, called WiFi (shorthand for wireless fidelity), is increasingly popular as manufacturers build receiver chips into laptops and handheld computers.

The broadcast costs are amazingly low. The estimate for mounting a network serving all of Philadelphia and its 1.5 million people, for example, is just $10 million, or less than $7 a person. "This comes as close to a free lunch as I've ever seen in my years watching technology," says Costis Toregas, recently retired president of Public Technology Inc. in Washington, D.C.

City governments are logical WiFi network initiators and anchor users, creating instant low-cost communications systems for every function from police reporting to meter reading, video surveillance to disaster management.

Yet once a city network is built, the same equipment can easily provide Internet service, including all manner of e-government services and free or low-cost Web service. Users include lower-income students and struggling small businesses likely to find normal commercial broadband service ($35 to $65 monthly) unaffordable.

Just this month, little Chaska, Minn., is shaking up the high-speed Internet providers by offering all its 7,000 homes city-run wire less broadband Internet for $16 monthly.