If the city of Chaska has its way, low-cost, high-speed Internet access might be the newest measure of Minnesota quality of life.

Chaska is shaking up high-speed Internet service by offering all 7,000 homes in town a city-run wireless broadband Net access service for $16 a month -- a price that substantially undercuts cable TV and telephone broadband providers serving the city.

"We see it as a quality of life issue," said Dave Pokorney, the Chaska city manager who oversees the project, called Chaska.net. "At one time, people needed to have telephone service at home, and now most people want and need Internet service at home. And when you have higher-speed Internet, it's a powerful communications tool."

Chaska is one of a handful of U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, that want to offer inexpensive wireless high-speed Internet access. But while Philadelphia is in the early planning stages, Chaska will begin selling its service at the end of September and charge them on their city utility bills. About 1,800 households have been using the service for free as part of a test that began in June. The city says it can break even if 1,500 households subscribe.

Wireless community

The social implications of cities offering inexpensive broadband Net access are profound. The cities might pressure telephone and cable companies to lower broadband prices, and thus accelerate adoption of fast Net access. In addition, city-offered broadband is likely to change the way consumers use the Internet by making it easier to obtain online information such as news, weather, music, maps and telephone numbers.

There also is an opportunity for cities to create tightly-knit communities by using an Internet log-in page as a community bulletin board, an event calendar and a linking point to other city-related Web pages.

"One of our city council's goals was to become a connected community," Pokorney said. "It will be such a great communications tool."

Chaska.net offers consumers download speeds of 800,000 to 2 million bits per second by turning the suburb into a city-wide Wi-Fi "hot spot," within which Net access is available to laptop and desktop computers that have tiny radio antennas. Wi-Fi stands for wireless fidelity, a popular technological standard for linking many computers to a single Internet connection. It is used in many homes, coffee shops, bookstores and airports.

Using 200 antennas mounted atop city-owned light poles, the Chaska.net service reaches an area of about 14 square miles and covers the homes of about 95 percent of Chaska's 22,000 residents. Improvements soon will extend the range to the rest of the population, Pokorney said. The city provides Chaska.net customers with free Wi-Fi antennas that are more powerful than those available at an electronics store; however, laptops equipped with standard Wi-Fi gear also will work.

Chaska isn't the first Minnesota city to offer such a service. For $26 a month, Buffalo, Minn., offers consumers a slower wireless service using older technology that was installed five years ago.

Of Chaska.net's competitors, Time Warner Cable's cable modem service, which is widely available in Chaska, costs $45; Sprint's DSL (digital subscriber line), which has only limited availability in the city, costs $40. Chaska will charge small businesses $25 a month for a set-up that allows them to operate their own Internet Web pages.

Time Warner Cable "is not convinced at this point that folks want to switch services," spokeswoman Kim Roden said. There also were doubts that Chaska.net could achieve its speed claims, she said.

Leading a trend

Chaska is leading a trend of cities offering Wi-Fi Internet access, said Roberta Wiggins, a research fellow at the Yankee Group in Boston. About 15 cities are experimenting with public Wi-Fi systems that provide limited coverage, but few have tried city-wide systems, she said. Cities wanting to use Wi-Fi will be helped by Intel Corp., which is including Wi-Fi capability in its new laptop chips.

Others are skeptical about cities being in the Internet access business. Cities often aren't good at managing utility businesses, and with Wi-Fi they could run into technical trouble from radio interference, said Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing at research firm Gartner in San Jose, Calif. Cities intent on offering wireless Internet might be wise to wait for a newer technology, called WiMax, which will offer better quality, he said.

But cities might want to offer Wi-Fi Internet service today because it makes broadband affordable for most citizens, Pokorney said.

"When we looked at offering residential service, we decided we would only do it if we could serve everyone in town, offer broadband speeds comparable to other providers and charge less than $20 a month -- or half of what you could buy broadband service for anywhere else," Pokorney said.

Steve Alexander is at alex@startribune.com.