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If you've ever surfed the Internet for free at San Francisco's City Hall, Boston's Harvard Square or Toronto's Harbourfront Centre – you have discovered a rarity in the world: a fee-free zone of wireless access called Universal WiFi.

Over the past decade, many municipalities across North America – including Toronto – talked big about providing free WiFi everywhere, formulating grandiose plans to make it as easy to pick up a signal as it was to access the local classic-rock station. The wisdom was that a wired city was a smarter city: more efficient, profitable and equitable. Those who typically couldn't afford access would suddenly have a free on-ramp to the information superhighway, as it was known back then. But in most cities, budgetary realities grounded their lofty plans.

Recently, however, Toronto councilman Denzil Minnan-Wong (Ward 34, Don Valley East) announced his intention to bring the idea back to life. “I want to be cautious about this,” Mr. Minnan-Wong said. “There have been too many rollouts and a lot of failures, but I'm cautiously optimistic that council wants to move forward with this and that it could be quite innovative.”

Perhaps best known for his campaigns to stamp out squeegee kids and panhandling in Toronto – and cultivating an image as a right-wing foil to Mayor David Miller – Mr. Minnan-Wong is championing a plan to deliver wireless access to public-housing communities, and maybe the rest of Toronto, using a network of mini satellite-like dishes – an idea that would join it with San Francisco in the cause of democratizing WiFi.

“It's certainly not a new idea, but it's an investment in kids who might not otherwise have access to the information highway and families that can't afford Internet,” he added. “Their children are at a disadvantage to other kids who can afford it. This is an investment in knowledge, in education and also it provides benefits to families who are looking for jobs and adults who are looking to upgrade their skills.”

He intends to spend the summer hashing out the details before unveiling plans for a pilot project to the government management committee in September.

One of the most likely scenarios he has explored would involve a so-called “mesh network.” Residents in public-housing communities could mount mini satellite dishes on their rooftops, which act as transmitters, blanketing the vicinity with radio waves that can be accessed by a computer.

Back in 2006, Toronto tried to create a similar effect with similar mesh technology. For six months, One Zone, a free WiFi hot spot, blanketed an area that stretched from Jarvis Street to Spadina Avenue and from Front Street to Bloor Street.

“ There have been too many rollouts and a lot of failures, but I'm cautiously optimistic that council wants to move forward with this and that it could be quite innovative ”— Toronto councilman Denzil Minnan-Wong

The effort was part of a greater movement percolating in the political ether: to bridge the digital divide. One on hand, there are the people who could afford the monthly access fees that Internet Service Providers charge and the computer that goes with it. Then there are the people living in low-income areas who are at an inherent disadvantage because they cannot pay to be online.

Local governments also favoured the idea, stressing that free WiFi would bolster a business's bottom line and burnish a city's image as a futuristic, smart city.

By 2005, there were more than 100 municipal WiFi networks slated in the U.S. and another 65 internationally, including ambitious plans for city-wide hot spots in Philadelphia and Boston, according to an October, 2008, study from the Community Wireless Infrastructure Research Project (CWIRP).

But even before the economy took a turn for the worse, these projects were being cancelled and the rate at which new programs were announced slowed to a trickle.

“I think it's fairly consistent to what happened in the U.S.,” said the report's lead author, Catherine Middleton. “There was a huge movement and then it became fairly obvious that it wasn't working terribly well. ... It wasn't clear that there was really a business case to develop municipal WiFi in a lot of instances.”

In the U.S., municipal WiFi plans encountered strong opposition from the telecom industry, which argued that cities shouldn't play a role in the development of Internet infrastructure.

In Philadelphia, for example, plans for a municipal WiFi system encountered staunch opposition from Verizon, which lobbied the state of Pennsylvania to enact a law that would prohibit the development of any further municipal networks.

Rogers Communications Inc. has vocally opposed municipal WiFi plans across Canada, arguing that cities shouldn't be using taxpayer money to build for-profit telecom infrastructure that competes with the private sector, said David Robinson, vice-president of new business planning for Rogers Wireless.

Many cities began to abandon the projects as costs started to pile up. WiFi was seen as a luxury, and opponents argued the money should be better spent on the more tangible kinds of highways.

There was also little evidence that WiFi actually made businesses more efficient. By and large, the planned hot spots were located in areas where many people already had access to mobile devices such as BlackBerrys and cellphones, or worked nearby at offices with faster connections.

The extra service was not only redundant – it was slower. “WiFi can be effective in providing secondary Internet access, but is not sufficiently robust to deliver primary Internet access,” according to the CWIRP report.

“ There was a huge movement and then it became fairly obvious that it wasn't working terribly well. ... It wasn't clear that there was really a business case to develop municipal WiFi in a lot of instances”— Catherine Middleton, lead author of an Oct. 2008 municipal WiFi study

In Toronto, WiFi sizzled – then fizzled – within a year. The One Zone service switched to a fee-based system in March, 2007. The service has survived a change in ownership when Toronto Hydro Telecom was acquired by Cogeco Inc., and these days can be accessed for a fee in Nathan Phillips Square and surrounding areas.

But inspiration for Mr. Minnan-Wong's proposal can be traced back to a similar project currently under way in the Bay Area known as Free the Net, a partnership between the city of San Francisco and technology company Meraki, Inc.

Based in the Bay area, Meraki builds wireless networking equipment that makes WiFi zones possible. It counts search-engine kingpin Google Inc. among its investors and already has some decidedly Google-like ambitions: its website claims its technology will “bring the next billion people online.”

Currently, the company is working on a long-term project to turn the entire city of San Francisco into a giant WiFi hot spot. The project started in June of 2007 and since then, Meraki has steadily rolled the program out to a growing number of neighbourhood communities.

Meraki's project isn't sponsored by the city. Instead, it is a DIY-spirited endeavour that speaks to the city's history of libertarianism and technology. The transmitter devices used to create the mesh network are mounted on roofs that belong to any citizen willing to participate. When Meraki moves the network into a new neighbourhood, it offers the residents a free transmitter and access to the network in return for mounting a transmitter on their home.

To date, more than 320,000 unique devices – laptops, mobile phones, etc. – have accessed the network.

“For us, it's a living, breathing test bed,” said chief executive officer Sanjit Biswas. “It's a showcase network for us. There aren't too many wireless networks that have had hundreds of thousands of users on them.”

Last June, Meraki and the city of San Francisco announced a plan to deploy Meraki's WiFi technology throughout the city's low-income and public-housing communities.

“It's something that from a cost perspective can be done pretty affordably and has a huge impact because it helps people get online, helps them get educated, helps them get jobs and so on,” Mr. Biswas said.

While Mr. Minnan-Wong may yet face opposition from council regarding his plans to bring WiFi to Toronto's housing projects, he would likely have the support of some in the technology community, including Wireless Toronto's Gabe Sawhney.

Wireless Toronto is a volunteer community group of technology enthusiasts that set up WiFi hot spots throughout the city, building networks that operate at Yonge-Dundas Square, the St. Lawrence Market and Harbourfront Centre.

“The digital divide is something that hasn't been adequately addressed in Canada, certainly in Toronto,” Mr. Sawhney said. “So an effort to make Internet access more easily and cheaply available to low-income residents of the city seems like a great initiative. But the devil is always in the details.”