Small-Town Wi-Fi and the Digital Divide

Filed in archive Wi-Fi on April 13, 2006

FORTUNE columnist Stephanie Mehta today looks at a small town in Minnesota that has a citywide wireless network.

"We went to Chaska, Minn., (pop. 18,000) which has been running its own wireless Internet service almost two years, to get a glimpse of what municipal Wi-Fi will really mean for average consumers," Mehta writes. "Chaska's service is indeed speedy (some customers report faster speeds than their old DSL service), and at $17 a month it certainly isn't expensive."

And the service, Mehta says, is available throughout the town's 16 square miles.

Still, Mehta says, omnipresent Broadband Internet access doesn't seem to have done much for Chaska. "I found a town that was utterly average -- maybe even a little backward -- in its broadband usage," she writes. "There were no executives on laptops hanging around the gazebo in the pretty town park; indeed, most users I interviewed didn't even realize the service was wireless."

"Nor had the promise of cheap broadband bridged the digital divide," she writes. "I wandered around one of the few economically strapped parts of the town, asking groups of teenagers if they'd heard of Chaska's wireless Internet service -- or knew anyone who was using it. No one had."