Book Overview
Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless: Applying lessons from Philadelphia's WiFi story
This book from columnist (Mobile Enterprise Magazine) and business strategist Craig Settles uses a combination of narrative and directive to follow the Philadelphia wireless story from its inception to the announcement of Earthlink winning the RFP bid to build out the citywide WiFi network. It's an important story of how the city sparked a 21st Century revolution that is being watched literally around the world.
Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless also offers valuable lessons for cities of all sizes. Mr. Settles provides guidelines for building a business case for muni WiFi and mobile workforce applications, creating an implementation plan, building consensus among various constituencies and executing pilot projects. Using insights and expertise gathered from his work in the field, the book also provides guidelines for deploying municipal broadband networks and determining ROI.
There are three main points that readers will take away from the book.
1. Municipal WiFi for many cities is a good business decision that is also good for business. Cities are a multi-million (and some cases multi-billion) dollar business operations, and like most corporate entities, WiFi enables governments to save money, increase revenues and run a better operation. A significant peripheral benefit of citywide WiFi is that it gives local businesses an excellent opportunity to derive similar benefits.
2. From an operational standpoint, Philadelphia did many things right. Starting with consensus building and identifying key stakeholders to help write the business plan, Wireless Philadelphia worked with a degree of professionalism and thoroughness that many corporations would do well to emulate in their wireless initiatives.
3. Many cities may not be aware of the work that's involved if they want to reach their goals. There's a significant amount of time and resources required if a city is going to realize its goal of using municipal broadband to seriously tackle social and economic development issues. Fighting the Good Fight is a reality check that every city needs.
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