Part of Guiyang’s attempt to become China’s ‘big data city’ was the rollout of citywide free Wi-Fi. To recoup money spend on the project, the government was supposed to rake in revenue from advertising through the system and even the selling of user data to corporations.

But some of the revenue sources have hit hurdles, and the government has lost tens of million of yuan so far, according to Science and Technology Daily.

Launched in 2015, the D-Guiyang Wi-Fi project allows free internet covering the whole city with simple WeChat or text-message registration. The municipal government expected to invest a total of 2 billion yuan ($300 million) to establish the project — China’s first citywide free Wi-Fi.

A joint-venture established by the Guiyang government and tech firms including Alibaba and Foxconn oversees the construction and operation of the project.

The project attempted to legally turn non-confidential user data into commercial assets, but failed due to undisclosed reasons.

Furthermore, with 5 million residents in Guiyang and over 110,000 daily D-Guiyang surfers, the program is struggling to sustain Wi-Fi connection quality, according to the report.

The faltering project is one of several in Guiyang’s digitization push. In February, a government-backed data management company in Guiyang began overseeing Apple’s iCloud data acquired in China. The city is also accelerating 5G implementation, which could be an alternative connection option to Wi-Fi.

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