I may be technologically challenged, but I’m crazy about Wi-Fi. I love taking a laptop anywhere in my house and staying “plugged in” to whatever Web site I want — following recipes in the kitchen, making airline reservations while I watch TV in the living room or doing research at my desk.

The only gripes I have are price and range. I’m paying $500 a year, which seems a bit stiff, since I’ve already purchased the equipment. And I often can’t quite get a signal on my back porch. Even the larger wireless networks in businesses, airports and libraries have their limitations, being confined to those distinct “hot spots.”

But that’s about to change, and oddly enough, it is cities that are leading the way. Municipal governments have been using Wi-Fi networks for some time, particularly in law enforcement. But in the past two years, cities of all sizes have embarked on ambitious plans to expand those networks throughout their jurisdictions, using their own grid of streetlights to hold the routers.

The idea is to build new wireless “mesh” networks that would hang like a cloud over cities — even big ones— so that every resident would have access. As utopian as it may sound, some midsize cities such as Tempe, Ariz., and small towns such as St. Cloud, Fla., already have them up and running.

The realization that this might turn into a significant phenomenon came almost two years ago, when Mayor John Street of Philadelphia, sort of an unlikely city to pioneer a tech revolution, announced that his government would build the largest wireless network in the world to serve all its residents. That threw the gates wide open. Now almost 200 cities and counties nationwide have disclosed similar plans. Studies by technology research firms project that, from the time of Philadelphia’s announcement in 2004 until 2010, the amount spent on these wireless networks will grow almost tenfold. Within the same time span, the area covered by municipal Wi-Fi could grow from 1,500 square miles (all but 200 in the United States) to 53,000 (just half of it in this country).

Whether it will be possible from a political, technological or business perspective is not at all clear. There is pressure in state legislatures, lobbied hard by the large cable and telecommunications companies, to keep government out of the Wi-Fi business. Some experts warn that the technology has not advanced enough to make it feasible. And there are significant differences in the business models being developed around the country, with no real guarantee that many of them will work.

Cities want to go wireless for a number of reasons. First, they would be able to take advantage of the networks themselves for all of their own communications, allowing field workers easy access to information from back at headquarters. Second, they could ensure that their poorest citizens had broadband access, always an issue with wired networks. And, rightly or wrongly, the whole idea is seen as a powerful bragging right for economic development.

The business plans cities are pursuing differ. Smaller towns such as Sahuarita, Ariz., intend to pay for and own their networks. Seattle wants to partner with companies to build and maintain its system. Philadelphia originally thought taxpayers would pay the $10 million cost, but that didn’t pan out politically, so the city contracted with Internet service provider Earthlink to build and operate (and also own) the system. In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsome at first claimed that the city’s proposed service would be free, struck a deal with Earthlink and Google to build it and support it with advertising — and then backed off a bit, saying only that it will be inexpensive. But Annapolis, Md., has partnered with Google for an ad-supported system that’s designed to be free.

Whatever business model survives, there are potential problems that the telecom and cable companies are not shy about pointing out: Existing Wi-Fi was intended to cover not a citywide bubble, but lots of small ones. The infant technology doesn’t yet share a common standard, so there is no compatibility between various systems. Such large wireless networks could well interfere with smaller, private ones. And if cities would just wait a bit, some new technologies right around the corner promise to be far superior.

But those warnings haven’t had much effect. Cities including Houston, Hartford, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Anaheim, and Washington, D.C., are in some stage of development. Even counties such as Genesee in Michigan and Suffolk on Long Island have taken the plunge. Two weeks ago, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation set a deadline for a contractor to complete work on a wireless network covering Central Park. By summer’s end, the agency hopes to have networks running in large parks in four of the five boroughs, augmenting private systems throughout the city.

So unless the telecom and cable companies can talk enough state legislatures, or perhaps even Congress, into interfering, it won’t be long before a number of mayors either look like visionaries or have a lot of egg on their faces.

Peter Harkness is the editor and publisher of Governing magazine, published by Congressional Quarterly Inc.