Photo: Ryan Donnell/The New York Times/Redux

If you look hard enough, you can see the future of Philadelphia high above the streets. It’s a tiny white box with two antennas poking up from the roof of a café in Love Park, in the heart of the city’s main business district. Smaller than a shoebox, the radio transceiver and router allow anyone nearby with a laptop to surf the Internet. Anybody can simply boot up and go online—no wires, no muss, no fuss. Philadelphia—all of it—is going Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi has been around for at least seven years now. You can get the service at little or no cost in countless airports, coffee shops, and chain restaurants. And now entire cities are blanketing themselves with the technology, making it available at low cost to one and all. They’re doing it because they see citywide Wi-Fi as a source of two kinds of booms: economic, because they hope it will put them on the high-tech map, attracting investment and brainworkers; social, because they hope to usher the poor as well as the rich into the same culturally vibrant world.

Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, Taipei, and Paris are but a few of the cities that are bringing Wi-Fi, in some capacity, to their citizens. But none has positioned itself more aggressively than Philadelphia. The city has an ambitious plan to transform itself into the biggest hot spot in the world.

Instead of having to hunker down in a café to surf the Net, people will be able to go anywhere within the city’s 350-square-kilometer boundaries and, for an estimated cost of US $20 per month, hop online. Data will flow at a speed of approximately 1 megabyte, both upstream and downstream. The service, expected to be finished by August 2007, is designed to work with laptops, personal digital assistants, and other wireless-enabled devices. There’s even talk of the service extending into the subway system.

But there are hitches and controversies. Buildings will need special equipment to let the wireless system inside. Telecoms are crying foul. Underserved communities are demanding computer training. Skeptics question whether a municipality should be meddling with Wi-Fi in the first place. “If I was resident of Philadelphia, where you’ve got problems with schools and roads,” says David McClure, president and chief executive of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, “I’d be concerned that you’re investing in a network that may not bring close to the [expected] returns.” Indeed, it is not clear that if you build it, very many people will come; Taipei’s service, though offered at a low price, has attracted few subscribers.

Philadelphia is at the heart of a burgeoning clash between city governments (which want to bring low-cost connectivity to the underserved) and telecommunications giants (which aren’t going to quietly surrender the profits they’ve been making by providing Internet access). Mayor John Street initiated the project in March 2004 as part of his program to transform poor neighborhoods by bridging a cultural and digital divide. In Philadelphia, more than 90 percent of households have access to the Internet, but in low-income areas that figure drops below 25 percent.

Not every new technology needs government programs to increase penetration. Just look at cellphones. But Philadelphia’s plan is not designed just to put computers into underserved areas; it also aims to teach people how to use them.

There would be benefits for the city itself. In this post-Katrina era, cities are more sensitive to the need for a robust, low-cost telecommunications system, especially in times of emergency. The city hopes that by giving emergency teams immediate, reliable communications, the system will shorten response times and economize on resources, thus saving money.

There’s also an intangible benefit. California has Silicon Valley and New York City has Silicon Alley, but Philadelphia has had little to show in high tech. It ranked 42nd in a survey of 50 wired cities conducted recently by Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Mass. “Right now, Philadelphia is in the middle of the road,” says Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff. “It does not stand out on either end. Being first to do this [provide citywide Wi-Fi] would put it on the map.”

Philadelphia is far from the only city on such a mission. In New York, with the city’s plan in flux, a nonprofit volunteer group called NYC Wireless has taken the battle into its own hands. It has worked to bring free, wireless access to 10 city parks, including the ones at Union Square and Tompkins Square. Meanwhile, Google has been sponsoring Web access in New York’s trendy Bryant Park.

Google also struck a five-year agreement in November 2005 to provide free wireless access to Mountain View, the Silicon Valley city where it is based. In fact, Google plans to pay the city $12 600 for the privilege of installing 400 wireless transmitters on streetlights throughout the area. The motivation wasn’t purely altruistic, of course. Google wanted an infrastructure to provide surfing for its employees in Mountain View. For other sponsors and Internet service providers, municipal Wi-Fi is simply a good business opportunity.

Meanwhile, the nonprofit corporation Wireless Philadelphia has been steadily trudging on. In October 2005, the organization announced that it had selected EarthLink, the Atlanta-based ISP, to build and manage the wireless network. No tax dollars are to be used to build the system’s infrastructure. Instead, EarthLink and Wireless Philadelphia have formed partnerships between public and private groups. Under the terms, a percentage of the income derived from the user fees will go back to Wireless Philadelphia.