Will 3G kill the wireless community movement?

Tomi Ahonen is the other half of the more than excellent Communities Dominate Brands blog, a record of changes in the business community, with a particular focus on mobile developments. Recently, Tomi surprised me with an argument that 3G mobile is going to undermine WiFi developments. While he clearly focuses on the commercial players in the field, I was wondering what the effect would be on the Wireless Community movement, i.e. the various attempts, such as FON, to create a worldwide, bottom-up, wireless broadband infrastructure, without intervention of the traditional Telco’s. I wrote an email with that question to Tomi,and here is his response.

See also the related trend for municipal broadband .

Tomi Ahonen:

The community-shared WiFi concept? A fascinating application of the younger generation’s passion to collaborate. From building software, services and applications online together, why not also build the telco infrastructure together, with our various pieces of WiFi equipment. Yes, I am following it with mild interest. It is quite a long-shot, as the vast majority of WiFi equipment in use is by corporations, campuses or commercial WiFi providers.

I think it has a good chance of succeeding in areas where there are lots of young well educated people – so college towns are very promising, Oxford, Cambridge, Boston etc. I think it is a particularly suitable case for "non-mobile" wireless, in areas or rather dense populations and yes, affluent youth. So we know where our fave cafe is, and we like to do our homework and videogaming and e-mail and blogging when sitting in that bar or that pub, and we tend to return to it. Our home – obviously another node, etc. With these, the movement pattern is quite predictable of where we might use a laptop (or PDA or smartphone) and then to find the members and join in building this kind of shared WiFi infrastructure makes sense.

If we are in a typical city – London, New York, Frankfurt etc – there is too much of that part of the population that does not share our values – who would only be wanting to gain from the venture, not contribute to it – I don’t have real studies to prove this, I am only guessing – so those who would want to set it up, would face enormous challenges by all the free-loafers.

But yes, when the right sort of community spirit exists – and yes, any university campus town sounds particularly suitable – so like outside of Chicago for example there is a town called DeKalb where Northern Illinois University is located. A shared WiFi network could have rapid adoption and success in the DeKalb area, but then would have a hard time expanding to cover all of Chicago. Then there could be three layers of WiFi coverage – on campus likely a campus NIU sponsored WiFi network for its students and faculty, fees as part of the tuition etc. Then outside the university, clusters of the shared WiFi coverage – and for example student dormitories and rental apartments might mention that they fall into the coverage zone of this new WiFi reach – and beyond that you’d have to pay subscription WiFi or 3G coverage to the carriers.

I think this kind of model will thrive in America in particular, and ever less the more the society is already in full 3G mode – ie Japan and Korea would not be big into this kind of model – and also where the mobile penetration is high, but internet/PC penetration is low, such as Italy and Portugal for example…

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