What Can Taipei's Wireless Initiative Learn from San Francisco's TechConnect?

The San Francisco Chronicle writes about Taipei’s wireless bubble in today’s business section. As measured by the number of antennas, Taipei’s wireless rollout is the largest in the world, and according to the article—adoption is slower than expected.

It’s definitely worth a read because Ryan Kim makes it a point of comparing the similarities between this project and San Francisco’s wireless initiative. Both are endorsed by the city, but are outsourcing the roll out and management of the project/infrastructure to a third party vendor. It seems also that one of Taipei’s wifi adoption challenges is that it is competing against your mom and pop (or as they say in Mandarin ma and ba) wifi hotspot cafes versus the new generation of broadband wireless cards offered by telecom companies through 3G cellular networks.

From the article:

Since it began 15 months ago, this city’s Wi-Fi system has grown rapidly to become the world’s largest, with more than 4,200 antennas and counting. The response of the populace, though, has fallen short of expectations.

The city has struggled to get subscribers to sign up for the service called WIFLY due to some perceived performance issues, competition from free hotspots and a lack of applications.

One thing that I feel that San Francisco has done right is to look at community usage patterns as a third “market” for wireless coverage. From the outset, the City and County of San Francisco has been very clear regarding its intent for digital inclusion.

This article doesn’t address how unconnected communities might benefit from having connection to Taipei’s wireless bubble.

And lastly:

Chang Sheng said Q-Ware [the vendor that is managing the infrastructure] and the city spent a good amount on advertising last year, primarily to announce the service in subway stations. But he said the company has since realized it needs to focus its marketing message on what people can do, not just advertising simple access.

The last point reminds me that the ideas and phrases such as “more than just access”, “digital inclusion”, “connecting the unconnected” are all problems that the community technology movement has had to grapple with for a long time with far less resources than the business world.