Where's All the Free Wi-Fi We Were Promised?

Municipal WiFi was the free, ubiquitous mesh of wireless Internet access that was supposed to carpet bomb the digital divide back to the stone age. So what happened? Eric Fraser, author of the superlative new guide to what went wrong with the dream of Municipal WiFi, A Postmortem Look at Citywide WiFi, has the answer. The short version is, no technology happens in a vacuum, and where the laws of the land abut the laws of nature, physics will carve your best-laid plans into a heap of sundered limbs every time.