Chicago Abandons City-Wide Wi-Fi

City moves away from Wi-Fi but says hello to WiMax.

On Tuesday Chicago announced that it was abandoning plans to create a city-wide Wi-Fi network, saying too few residents and that it would prove too costly.

“We realized — after much consideration — that we needed to reevaluate our approach to provide universal and affordable access to high speed Internet as part of the city’s broader digitalinclusion efforts,” said Chicago’s chief information officer, Hardik Bhatt, in a statement.   The plan had been announced last year, but the need for massive public financing has proved tobe a stumbling block. Initially, the city had hoped that it would only have to provide infrastructure for the network.   Currently around 175 cities or regions in the U.S. have full or partialWi-Fi systems.   Instead, Chicago will be among the first three cities to experiment with the new WiMax wireless network. Offered by Sprint, it derives fromthe same technology as Wi-Fi, but provides a signal that can cover a much wider area, and offer the same connection speeds as DSL or cable.