MuniWifi
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Philadelphia wants to buy Earthlink's former hardware, keep municipal WiFi dream alive
It never came to pass. Philadelphia's city-wide WiFi plan was announced in 2006 and then, after struggling on for two years, died when Earthlink decided it wanted nothing to do with muni wireless. A private company called NAC bought the hardware last year and now the city wants to buy it from them for $2 million. The Mayor's Office pledges to "provide free internet in targeted public spaces," which is somewhat less aggressive than the previous city-wide reach, but ditching the $20/month that Earthlink was asking seems like a fair trade. The only question now is exactly which spaces will be targeted, and if South Street Philly Bagels doesn't make the list that's a damn shame.
Philadelphia's citywide WiFi close to shutting down
It'd be absolutely spectacular to actually see one of these admittedly ambitious municipal WiFi projects actually work out every now and then, but instead, we're seeing the nails start to sink into yet another citywide WiFi coffin. This go 'round, the network blanketing most of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is on the verge of sending out its last signals unless the city can devise a plan in short order to take it over from EarthLink, who unsurprisingly wants out on the double. Unfortunately, we don't have a great feeling about the system's future -- history has a way of forecasting, you know?[Via CNET, image courtesy of Stippling]
San Francisco muni WiFi project on its death bed
Not that anyone who lives in the fair city of San Francisco was really all that confident that the muni WiFi project would ever make it off the ground -- even despite Major Gavin Newsom's best intentions -- but now it looks like bad's gone to worse. As you may have read, yesterday EarthLink laid off nearly a thousand employees, and word came today that addition to that news, it's latest corporate restructuring would have it completely backing out of investments in its San Fran WiFi project contract, as well as the WiFi contracts in other cities. Again, not the most earth quaking news, given the word we received from the city that they were more or less pulling the plug anyway.Watch the whole thing crumble, in slow-mo reverse chronological order:Read (April 6th, 2006) - San Francisco selects Google/Earthlink for citywide WiFiRead (January 6th) - It's official: San Francisco to get free WiFi blanket courtesy of Google / EarthLinkRead (August 6th) - San Francisco pulls the plug on Google / Earthlink's citywide WiFi... for nowThis post, today.
L.A. mayor wants muni WiFi by 2009
Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, wants municipal WiFi in his fair city, and he seems to have the wherewithal to make it happen. Such a project, covering 498 square miles of the sprawling city, would be a massive undertaking, costing somewhere around $54-$62 million. The city will probably partner with a private provider such as Google or Earthlink to pay for and manage the installation, and should be seeking bids this fall. Villaraigosa is already forming a working group, and plans on hiring an expert to iron out the details. Aware of the certain, ahem, problems encountered in San Francisco and other places, Villaraigosa says the initiative is "not going to be a study to put on the shelf." L.A. also owns its own street light and power poles and electric utility, overcoming an obstacle with Southern California Edison, which has denied WiFi installations a place on its own poles in other California cities. Of course, there are plenty of ways that a project this massive could go wrong, but if L.A. can pull this off it'll have some quite notable bragging rights, that's for sure.[Thanks, Gary N]
Culver City to install filters on its municipal WiFi network
They call Los Angeles the City of Angels. We didn't find it to be that exactly -- particularly when much like anywhere else, folks are accustomed to downloading pr0n and tons of illicit materials on BitTorrent. Fortunately for us, upright citizens of Culver City, an LA suburb, will be installing Net filters (Audible Magic's CopySense Network Appliance, to be specific) on its free WiFi municipal network, which covers 10 square blocks in its downtown area. Sadly funnier still are the hacks at the MPAA who praised the move (but of course), saying that this new filter will "help safeguard system users from being subject to illegal files" -- as if somehow all of these "illegal files" just come raining down out of the sky on innocent folks wanting to read, say, Engadget. [Via TechDirt]
Earthlink's Anaheim muni WiFi getting VoIP phones
Apparently entirely unafraid of being accused of cannibalizing their own MVNO business -- at least in the fair town of Anaheim, California, anyway -- Earthlink's freshly rolled out WiFi network will take on a new charge providing wireless VoIP service, to offered on WiFi-only voice phones with calling plans between $10 and $25 per month. Of course your calling area is limited only to those portions of the Anaheim WiFi rollout currently complete (Earthlink plans to eventually have 50 square miles rolled out when the dust settles), but Earthlink VP says their test handsets are running handoffs at up to 40 miles per hour -- which you know is remarkably fast if you've ever actually driven in Southern California. Still, with wireless Skype handsets, portable Vonage adapters, and all manner of VoIP software for WiFi-enabled cellphones, it seems like the early adopter crowd Earthlink has its sights on in Anaheim might need a little more incentive to drop a couple hundred on a handset that may or may not only make calls on Earthlink's SoCal WiFi rollout.
