The City of Chaska is about to become one huge wireless-Internet "hot spot."

The Carver County seat is creating a Wireless Fidelity network so vast it will blanket virtually every home, business and city office with broadband-grade bandwidth that is, super-fast access to the Internet without a hard-wired connection.

But the computer network will work like smaller Wi-Fi hot spots commonly found in coffee shops and other public gathering places.

That puts the western Twin Cities suburb in rarefied company. It is among a small but growing number of U.S. cities that have installed or plan to install near-ubiquitous Wi-Fi access. And it's one of the first to offer Wi-Fi as a municipal service that competes with commercial broadband providers.

In Chaska, those providers include Sprint, which offers phone-based DSL service, and Time Warner cable. The national companies could face a formidable foe in tiny Chaska.Net, the city-run Internet service provider.

Along with its wireless-Internet-anywhere approach, which neither Sprint nor Time Warner can match, Chaska.Net intends to compete on price about $16 a month for home users, or roughly what pokey dial-up access costs.

The city foresees at least 2,000 of its 18,000 residents signing up for the wireless service, creating what information-systems manager Bradley Mayer calls a "connected community" and defraying network-setup costs over about three years.

Chaska.Net has prior wireless experience, offering a more specialized kind of online access to about 85 business clients throughout Carver County.

The city's newer wireless network also is intended as a public safety tool. Computers now found in police squads will be adapted for Wi-Fi use, for instance.

But the network is primarily intended for home users, which makes Chaska and its technology partner, California-based Tropos Networks, consumer-Wi-Fi trendsetters.

Tropos specializes in adapting the short-range Wi-Fi technology for long-range use. This is accomplished with radiolike devices installed atop light poles and other vantage points. The devices don't require hard-wired access to the Internet, only power, which means they can be deployed quickly and affordably.

In Chaska, 64 of the wireless-networking devices are scattered over a 4-square-mile test area. About 200 will be deployed over 12 to 13 square miles by mid-June to create a citywide network, Mayer said.

Once the radios are in place, home users will get wireless access from any nearby radio, said Tropos communications director Brad Day. Users who work in different locations throughout the day will only need to log on once. They will even be able to surf as passengers in moving vehicles as they travel within the network, he said.

Access won't require exotic, expensive gear but only a standard Wi-Fi laptop card or equivalent, such as a newer-model Windows or Macintosh portable with integrated Wi-Fi. Home users will get wireless "bridges" that function as Wi-Fi receivers, Day said.

This is all well and good, said one industry expert, but Wi-Fi isn't necessarily the best technology for a citywide wireless network.

Using the short-range technology for long-range networks is like "using a hammer to drive in a screw," said Derek Kerton of the Curtain Group, a Silicon Valley wireless-technology consulting firm. "You can do it, but wouldn't it be better if you found a better tool?"

Such tools include wireless technologies such as EvDO and EDGE now being used by the likes of Verizon Wireless and AT&T Wireless to offer citywide service around the country. Wi-Fi, in contrast, is designed to be a "wireless local-area network" technology, with an emphasis on the "local," Kerton argued.

While praising Tropos' ingenuity, Kerton warned that the firm's city networks could be subjected to interference from other Wi-Fi networks as well as from cordless phones, microwave ovens and other devices that use the same wireless spectrum.

Ron Pequette, a Tropos sales director who appeared with Mayer at a Tuesday press conference, said the firm has the interference problem licked.

Tropos' Day said Wi-Fi is a fine choice for a citywide wireless network because it's a proven, low-cost, easy-to-use technology that performs reliably in other U.S. cities where the firm has done work. Tropos has set up or is installing large-scale Wi-Fi networks in New Orleans, North Miami Beach, Fla., and the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos.

Tropos faces stiff competition from other Internet firms and wireless technologies.

A Wi-Fi cousin known as WiMax is gaining ground around the country even though it's still experimental. In Minnesota, firms such as StoneBridge Wireless and Implex.net offer WiMax-based wireless service over large areas. St. Paul-based PCS Technologies sells the specialized Alvarion gear needed to set up WiMax networks.

Other wide-scale-wireless experiments have failed spectacularly in the region. In July 2001, Metricom pulled the plug on the Ricochet service it offered in the Twin Cities and about a dozen other cities. It was the nation's first large-scale high-speed network.

And earlier this year, Kirkland, Wash.-based Monet Mobile Networks halted EvDO service in Duluth and other cities in and near Minnesota after less than two years.