EarthLink Says No Future for Municipal Wi-Fi 126
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."
city-wide wifi has its uses (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [olsr.org]
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3626.txt [ietf.org]
[3] http://db.leipzig.freifunk.net/uptime/png/ [freifunk.net] -- careful, images is 3165x4206
Re:If thats not foul play, i dont know what is (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If thats not foul play, i dont know what is (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:city-wide wifi has its uses (Score:5, Informative)
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:Unnecessary (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If thats not foul play, i dont know what is (Score:3, Informative)
The city (via AT&T) planned to put the access points on light poles. But it turns out that in most neighborhoods when the lights go "out" they don't just switch themselves off -- they're actually cut off from power entirely at some central point that controls hundreds or thousands of lights by pretty much pulling the plug on them.
To a techie, this seems silly because instead of a central sensor, you can have individual light sensors on the poles that can determine when to be on or off. But from a city-building standpoint, it makes total sense. It's completely simple, and there are far fewer parts to break. It's like yanking the plug on a string of Christmas lights. Low-tech brilliance.
Re:Fucked again by Public Private Partnerships. (Score:3, Informative)
In Minneapolis Earthlink lost a bid to build out a Wi-Fi network to a local firm. That network is just starting to come online and should be completed soon. It will be interesting to see how the local firm does with what Earthlink considers unprofitable.
If what you claim happened in fact occurred, then that would clearly be a case of the city bending over and taking it in the keister from ATT.