I have never seen such wrong headedness in my life!!! I wonder how much the state pays for internet for its schools, hospitals, libraries… in fact all its municipal workers. If the network was 80% complete it was time to force all the public servants off the copper wire and into the cloud. The second step should have been to give it away to all residents, and I mean give it away – (you need to create a bit of a market here), then offer faster speeds for paying members of the public. Thirdly, they needed to offer companies a reason to get on the wifi as customers – a state wide tax rebate could do it, or make the charge for use of the network rebateable at year end. I hear what Benz is saying about Ad-supported, but I don’t think that is enough – they needed to hit 250,000 – 300,000 users first and then think of a way of monetising the 100,000 they needed.

Why not capitalize on the infrastructure they already set up by turning it into a free ad-subsidized network. They shouldn’t have looked to turn a direct profit from the service, but instead looked for it to bring more customers into the city, and increase productivity within the city.