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How would a city handle the pressure from telco's if they offer free, reliable wifi? Wouldn't all residential's switch to the free wifi, making telcos lose hundreds of thousands of customers?

Has there been a case where free wifi for a city has been implemented reliably where residential stopped purchasing internet from a telco?

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Free public wifi, unless intensively engineered in cases where problems develop, can't promise 100% coverage to everyone's residence. Some people will get a windfall that effectively replaces their SP's service. Some will get only unusable connectivity.

SPs have a simple way to compete: Offer service that provides a lot more bandwidth than the free service. They should do that anyway, now that Google Fiber has announced a push into some major cities.

Would people in the "good coverage" area be able to run repeaters for this kind of WiFi provider so that, for example, their friend across the street could be covered? I'm not familiar enough with large-scale WiFi infrastructure to know whether they have mechanisms in place to prevent such practices (or if they'd want to).

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