Free Wi-Fi in Chicago?

By Matt Wood in Miscellaneous on Feb 17, 2006 5:27PM

Chicago's chief technology officer announced yesterday that the city will seek bids from technology vendors for building out a city-wide wireless internet network, or "Wi-Fi," as the kids call it. The network would compete directly with cable, DSL, and cell phone based ISPs, who, if Chicagoist's personal experience is indicative of everyone else's, tend to take their customers for granted. A vendor-backed service would be similar to what Google has proposed in San Francisco, where they offered to foot the bill for a free Wi-Fi network citywide, as long as people don't mind looking at [more] ads while they surf.

But don't ditch your favorite coffee shop hotspots just yet. The plan has some major caveats. Some of our favorites from the Tribune article:

"While there are few concrete plans for how the system will operate and no guarantee it will ever be built..."

And

"'The city won't invest money or operate the service," said Chris O'Brien, Chicago's outgoing chief information officer. 'The service cannot be too expensive and must be universally available across the city.'"

So, as long as someone comes up with a plan, pays for it, operates it, and does it on the cheap, then the city is all for it. On that note then, Chicagoist would like to request bids for replacing all the CTA trains and buses with flying cars. We don't have any idea how to do it, we can't pay for it, and we won't help drive them. But as long as you can do it for the price of a chalupa, we're down.

Obviously we're all for free internet service everywhere, but we're not holding our breath either. There are just too many things that can go wrong with this plan and too many existing ISPs who will do everything they can to stop it. We'd love to be proven wrong though.