I gave an interview last week for this article [1] about Gloucester County, New Jersey’s decision to postpone their plan (indefinitely) to deploy a wireless network across the county. By now, it’s no surprise that several cities and counties have either abandoned their plans completely or are changing them to meet more targeted goals. Still, some cities such as Minneapolis and Riverside are going ahead with their networks.

The article about Gloucester did not include everything that I said at the interview because they did not have enough space to print my opinions.

One of the questions I was asked to address is: should cities wait for the technology to improve before they go ahead with deploying a wireless network?

My answer is: it depends.

1. What does the city want to do with the network? If it wants 100 Mbps symmetrical wireless access for everyone, yes, they have to wait for vendors to produce wireless access points that do that. When that will happen, who knows.

2. If there are products today that allow a city to improve services and efficiency, then it becomes a cost-benefit analysis. We do this all the time in our own homes and offices. Do you wait until next year to get a new laptop or to buy a new printer? Do you keep putting off the purchase? Technology is never perfect and the decision to buy (or upgrade) equipment and software now has more to do with the benefits you get today outweighing the cost.

What has happened in the past year that we did not see two years ago is the dramatic decline in house prices and with that, the inability of many municipalities and counties to meet their budgets. Because of this, they may put off purchases and upgrades.

I won’t get into business model discussions here, except to say that there will be several announcements of cities deploying muni wireless networks in the coming months and all of them are based on the anchor tenancy model.