Peter Shyu, an engineer, spends most of his day out of the office and when he needs an Internet connection he often pops into one of the many coffee shops in Taipei that offer free wireless access.
He could use WiFly, the extensive wireless network commissioned by the city government that is the cornerstone of Taipei's ambitious plan to turn itself into an international technology hub. But that would cost him US$12.50 a month.
"I'm here because it's free and if it's free elsewhere, I'll go there, too," said Shyu, hunched over his IBM laptop in an outlet of the Doutor coffee chain. "It's very easy to find free wireless connections."
PHOTO: CHAO-YANG CHAN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Despite WiFly's ubiquity -- with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population -- just 40,000 of Taipei's 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Qware Systems Inc (
That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other US cities that are building wireless networks of their own.
Like Taipei, these cities hope to use their new networks to help less affluent people get online and to make their cities more business-friendly. Yet as Taipei has found out, just building a citywide network does not guarantee that people will use it. Most people already have plenty of access to the Internet in their offices and at home, while wireless data services let them get online anywhere using phones, laptops and PDAs.
Like Qware, operators in the US, Europe and other parts of Asia are eager to build municipal networks. But they are grappling with the high expectations politicians are placing on them. On June 9, MobilePro backed out of plans to develop a wireless network in Sacramento, California, because it said the city wanted it to offer free access and recoup its investment with advertising, not subscriptions, a model that other cities are hoping to adopt. Elsewhere, incumbent carriers have challenged cities' rights to requisition new networks. And many services have had difficulty attracting customers.
"There is a lot of hype about public access," said Craig Settles, a technology consultant in Oakland, California, and author of Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless. "What's missing from a lot of these discussions is what people are willing to pay for."
Qware's relationship with Taipei has been less contentious, partly because the WiFly network is just one piece of a far broader and highly regarded plan to incorporate the Internet into everything the government does.
The brainchild of Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), the CyberCity project was first conceived in 1998 as a way to catapult past Hong Kong, Seoul, South Korea and other Asian cities that were recasting themselves as metropolises of the future. Many government agencies now communicate almost exclusively online, saving millions of dollars and citizens have been given hundreds of thousands of free e-mail accounts and computer lessons.
WiFly plays a role, too, by allowing policemen to submit traffic tickets wirelessly, for instance. But making it appeal to the average citizen is another story. Qware, which is part of a conglomerate that, among other things, operates 7-Eleven franchises in Taiwan, has found that consumers will pay subscription fees only if there are original offerings to pull them in.
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