The Need for Public WiFi

One of the most interesting positive things that came out of the COVID pandemic was that communities and organizations across the country deployed public WiFi hotspots. This was done at the time to support students and workers who were expected to find a way to work remotely. And this worked well in a lot of places, and I’ve talked to communities who said the public flocked to the free WiFi during the pandemic. There was another benefit of the free hot spots—they created places where people who couldn’t afford broadband suddenly had a place to access the Internet. This number of people varies by community, but the nationwide numbers suggest that around 14 percent of homes don’t have a home broadband solution, and as many as 80 percent of those folks say they would buy a home broadband solution if they could afford it. I recently realized that a huge percentage of the pandemic-inspired hot spots are gone. In some cases, the WiFi radios are wearing out, and there is no funding to replace them. Other communities have turned off public WiFi because nobody is paying for the underlying broadband connection. In other cases, there is nobody who wants the responsibility of maintaining and operating the WiFi network.