This past Monday the city of San Francisco launched free wireless Internet on its heavily trafficked Market Street.  For almost a decade San Francisco has been trying to find the best way to offer wi-fi without charge, including a deal with EarthLink about seven years ago and a separate deal with AT&T just last year.  Both of these plans fell apart, however, so the city decided to take matters into its own hands.

The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Marc Touitou, the appointed chief information officer of the city, who said: “It was simpler, faster, better to [offer wi-fi] on our own. The quality is higher with the technical design by the Department of Technology. We wanted high capacity… We wanted it to be cool—no strings attached, no ads.”

Touitou's team ran fiber-optic cable along Market Street and then connected it to network equipment set up on traffic lights and other city-owned fixtures.

The network was quietly brought online in stages over the past several months, and it was up and running late Friday under the network name ‘_San_Francisco_Free_WiFi’.

Now the quarter-of-a-million people who walk down Market Street every day will be able to connect to high-speed wi-fi with no cost or ads.  On top of this, Google has made a deal with the city to provide free wi-fi in 31 San Francisco state parks for at least the next two years.

Although it is only one area of San Francisco, It won’t be too surprising if free wi-fi is available everywhere in the city sometime in the near future, which may set the precedent for the whole country.