One of the greatest ironies related to the city's waste of wireless Internet that Minneapolis buys has been that City Hall itself remains a WiFi dead zone.
That all may change very soon. The City Council's budget committee approved a measure last week that would spend $108,000 to enable WiFi in City Hall and rented office space across the street.
That's important because the city has spent about $4.7 million since 2006 on bandwidth it doesn't use.
In 2006, the city agreed to pay $1.25 million a year to USI Wireless to be their "anchor tenant" as the company built a citywide wireless Internet network.
That contract allows USI to provide cheap WiFi to the rest of the city.
The plan was that city employees would gobble up the bandwidth, while improving efficiency at City Hall. But last year, the city only used 11 percent of its annual contract.
The City Hall measure must be approved by the full council before the buildings can be upgraded.
