The Detroit News rounds up three large-scale projects in Michigan, each of which is facing its own challenges: The writer is rather kind when she writes, "St. Louis, Chicago and San Francisco recently scaled back projects because of low demand and problems with providers." (St. Louis is still because of utility pole electricity issues; Chicago rethinking; SF, up in the air.) Projects in Oakland and Washtenaw counties are still quite limited and well over a year behind schedule, but the providers for each say they've overcome difficulties.
Oakland County's MichTel Communications-run effort has 13,000 users, but those are largely using an ad-supported, free flavor; subscribers number in the "hundreds," the article says. At one point, MichTel was talking about an early use of mobile WiMax; I haven't seen any news on that front since their first announcements.
Washtenaw has covered 15 sq mi in cities like Ann Arbor, but only 700 registered users and 80 users who have paid for an upgraded service. The county has 344,000 residents, and the project is still planned to cover 720 sq mi. Macomb's network, built by MICA Networks, hit a snag in that the city--the company says in this article--couldn't ensure continuous rights to sites where they're locating Wi-Fi nodes, making the company uninterested in expanding the network.
My friend lives in Ann Arbor and tried to use the Washtenaw Wireless a few months back. He pinged a server for 20 minutes and finally one packet came back.
I'm not sure what the point of covering AA is -- 4 years ago we "war-drove" thru his neighborhood (a few blocks from downtown), we would hit 15 APs just on block. There must be a dozen Internet providers in AA.
Seems like they should do the hard work of rural coverage, where there are probably zero or one ISPs currently.