Municipal WiFi, which enjoyed a high profile but brief vogue a decade ago, is back in style. Several cities, especially in the US, now have large-scale, municipally-supported schemes to blanket key districts with WiFi, to support new services and narrow the digital divide. The largest of all promises to be in New York City, where the metropolis’s government is planning the fastest and largest free muni WiFi deployment in the world, harnessing all kinds of infrastructure including payphone boxes. Payphone boxes have been a popular location for WiFi for years – BT uses its ageing network as hotspots in the UK, for instance. But New York is considering something more ambitious, and has far better prospects than the projects of…