EarthLink wins bid for New Orleans WiFi network
By Donald Melanson 
posted May 26th 2006 6:02PM
posted May 26th 2006 6:02PM
Shortly after winning approval to build a 15-square mile WIFi network in Philly, Earthlink has now gotten the go ahead to build one in New Orleans, replacing the city's free but slow city-owned network. As with the Philidelphia network, New Orleans' will extend for 15-square miles and should cost users about $20 a month for 1-megabit-per-second service, although Earthlink says a slower 300 kbs service will be available for free and without advertising while the city rebuilds. No word yet on when deployment of the mesh network will begin, but it will apparently use gear from Tropos Networks with some additional hardware from Motorola's MOTOwi4 line of products.
I hope for the good peeps in new orlans that it stays free, and just becomes ad based later on.
FREE INTERNET FOR ALL!
Korey, its catastrophies like this that modivate whole cities to finially embrase a all digital age and drop analog. If your city gets it you can give thanks to other cities for paving the way.
It happened in a hard hit florida city a while back where they finially decided to rebuild all digital phone systems.
I agree about keeping the free link permanently.
They should also allow simple one month only access for visting tourists and businessmen and women. That will enable them to justify a trip to New Orleans because they can still communicate with the office if necessary.
because it is Earthlink, there's 0% chance that it will NOT suck.
Hmmm... last I checked, New Orleans was bigger than that. What about the people outside that radius?
They have a free wi-fi right now that covers at least the CBD (central business district). Nice and fast, but I was not able to get my VPN to properly connect using it. I was, nonetheless, impressed when I opened up my laptop (on a hunch) and saw they had one in place.