EarthLink Says No Future for Municipal Wi-Fi

Glenn Fleishman writes "EarthLink dropped its final bombshell on city-wide Wi-Fi, saying that it wouldn't put more money in and was talking to their current deployed cities about the future. The company had won bids in dozens of cities, and then backed out of the majority of them before building or finalizing contracts a few months ago. The remaining towns they were building out, like New Orleans, Anaheim, and Philadelphia, will ostensibly be turned off unless local officials come up with scratch or a plan of their own. EarthLink pioneered the model of free-for-fee networks, where there would be no cost or upfront commitment from cities, and EarthLink would charge for network access. Apparently, you can't make money that way."

Comments

city-wide wifi has its uses

[erlehmann]

for example in the eastern part of germany, after reunification, there were lines in cities that could not be used for DSL. the german "freifunk" (literally "free wireless", both as in beer and as in speech) project managed to build some sizeable city mesh nets using a routing protocol known as OLSR [1,2].

just look in awe at the leipzig cloud [3]. also, try to imagine wireless cell phone / pda mesh nets (probably doable right now with openmoko).

[1] http://olsr.org/
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3626.txt
[3] http://db.leipzig.freifunk.net/uptime/png/ -- careful, images is 3165x4206

Re:city-wide wifi has its uses

[fireboy1919]

using a routing protocol known as

You're kind of missing the point in this example. Citywide 802.11x is not going to work. The protocol can't handle it. It doesn't scale up to even 100 users at once.

The obvious solution is to use some other protocol.

Re:If thats not foul play, i dont know what is

[div_2n]

First, you can legally use all eleven channels of 802.11b in the US. It just so happens that if you want to have perfect channel separation, channels 1, 6 and 11 are the way to go. I've sat in on a discussion about using 1, 4, 8 and 11 or some such combination and achieving acceptable separation provide the APs aren't on top of each other.

Regardless, using the three channels and 120 degree directional antennas to cover the full 360 is the most effective way. That isn't cheap. Even if you roll your own using a WRAP board or some such thing, last I checked you can't get a weather proof AP with all three channels and antennas for less than $1,000. That doesn't count labor.

Re:Clearly I know absolutely nothing about this, b

[eggboard]

It's a great point. In some cases, EarthLink had won a bid, but not started contract negotiations. In some cases, a contract was on the table, but not signed. In some cases, a contract was completed, but the city hadn't executed it (often, a mayor works out the details and a council approves it, and then a utility has to be involved to agree to pole uses).

Where a contract is in place, EarthLink will have to unwind its obligations. In Houston, it paid $5m for not starting the network. In Philadelphia, they will likely pay out millions to walk away.