Free San Francisco Wi-Fi project dies
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EarthLink has backed out of a deal to build San Francisco's free citywide Wi-Fi service.
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Business models followed technology too closely A year ago, hardly a week went by without news of a major municipal wireless project in the US, supporting free or subsidized access and a host of shiny business models. Now hardly a week goes by without news of the death of one of these plans.â¦
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Manchester City Council plans free wi-fi zone covering more than 400 square miles.
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By Miriam Hill, The Philadelphia Inquirer  Dec. 18--The grand experiment is about to begin.   Philadelphia's push to become the country's first major city with free, or at least cheap, wireless Internet connections, takes a big step forward this month as EarthLink Inc.
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arvind s. grover writes &quot;San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom stated yesterday in his state of the city address that every San Francisco resident will have free wireless internet access.
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Pah - we sneer at your global economies of scale! More dismal news for the US consumer. After the simultaneous failure of Municipal Wi-Fi projects in three major US cities - something we predicted four years ago - faster, cheaper mobile data looks further away than ever.â¦
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Meraki, a Silicon Valley startup, pledges to "free the net" and it will expand free Wi-Fi coverage beyond two San Francisco neighborhoods to an additional six communities within the city. With funding from Google and Sequoia Capital, and a lot of community volunteers, it might work.
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(InfoWorld) - Silicon Valley will get a homegrown Wi-Fi network from Cisco Systems to provide Internet access in metropolitan areas spread across about 1,500 square miles. The Wireless Silicon Valley Task Force chose a group led by Cisco and IBM to build and operate the network, which will cover areas between the southern border of San Francisco and Santa Cruz, and from the Pacific inland to the opposite side of San Francisco Bay. Cisco will provide the infrastructure and IBM will be the master system integrator for the project. Their team, called Silicon Valley Metro Connect, also includes Azulstar Networks, which will be the service provider operating the network, and SeaKay, a nonprofit that will help get disadvantaged residents online. As municipalities around the world jump on the public Wi-Fi bandwagon, the Silicon Valley project takes a high profile because of both its location in a legendary high-tech region and its sheer size. Although Silicon Valley Metro Connect's current plans wouldn't cover the entire region, large parts of which are lightly populated or undeveloped, the project has gotten sign-in from 42 municipalities. A notable exception is Mountain View, which has its ownÂ city Wi-Fi networkÂ provided by hometown giant Google. Silicon Valley Metro Connect is now entering into negotiations with the task force, said Alan Cohen, senior director of mobility solutions at Cisco. There will probably be a wide variety of services and business models, including paid service, free Internet access and use of the network by government agencies, he said. The first parts of the network should be up and running in the fourth quarter, Cohen said, but he described the whole project as a "multi-year effort." The offering will focus initially on outdoor coverage in populated areas of cities, though some users may be able to reach the network from indoors. The company envisions a network that uses 802.11b/g to connect with users' notebook PCs and other devices and 802.11a, with directional antennas, for meshed backhaul links to wired networks. It will use a wireless LAN switch model with lightweight access points that are centrally controlled. Wider-range WiMax technology could come into play later, Cohen said. Cisco, IBM, and SeaKay also were behind a proposal for San Francisco's planned Wi-Fi network. There, theyÂ lost out to Google and EarthLinkÂ in April, but the group said it would compete for municipal wireless projects around the country under the Metro Connect banner.
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Chicago has scrapped its ambitious plan to blanket the city with Wi-Fi coverage, saying it would be too expensive.
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(InfoWorld) - EarthLink's current contract to build a municipal Wi-Fi network in San Francisco appears to be dead followingÂ a restructuring of the struggling Internet service provider. The deal, hammered out in months of negotiations last year and completed in January, calls for EarthLink to build a citywide network at no cost to the city and sell high-speed service to residents while Google provides a free, slower service over the same network. But after announcing layoffs of nearly half its workforce and a gloomier financial forecast, EarthLink said Wednesday it won't invest any more money in that business model. "We will not devote any new capital to the old muni Wi-Fi model that has us taking all of the risk by fronting all of the capital, then paying to buy our customers one by one," President and CEO Rolla Huff said on a conference call Wednesday morning. That includes currently planned networks where the company hasn't yet made capital investments, EarthLink spokesman Jerry Grasso confirmed. In San Francisco and other such cities, networks would have to be built under new arrangements. "We will approach them to discuss the needed changes to the business model," Grasso said. He declined to comment on the state of discussions with any particular city. San Francisco's deal with EarthLink has yet to be approved by the city and county's Board of Supervisors, where it faces fierce opponents. The deal is due for a vote in the Board's Budget and Finance Committee next week that could send it on for full board approval. But the changes at EarthLink appear to make the current contract a dead issue. EarthLink's municipal Wi-Fi woes come as the company struggles across most of its businesses and as the overall climate for municipal Wi-Fi changes. The promise of free networks supported by advertising or residential subscriptions has faded, and EarthLink and other network providers are looking to local government as "anchor tenants" that support the projects by buying services. Chicago, which had been talking with EarthLink and others about a citywide Wi-Fi project, dropped the plan this week, citing high cost and low subscriber interest. The company forecast municipal Wi-Fi capital investments of $30 million to $35 million in 2007 as it completes projects already begun in Philadelphia; Corpus Christi, Texas; and Anaheim, California, but is not forecasting any capital spending on municipal networks in 2008, Grasso said. Aaron Peskin, president of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, approached EarthLink earlier this year with proposed amendments to the Wi-Fi deal that he hoped would make it more palatable to opponents. However, he rejected the idea of anchor tenancy, saying the city's departments weren't ready to use the Wi-Fi network. Neither Peskin nor San Francisco city officials were immediately available for comment.
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Although its ambitious plan to provide free Wi-Fi for the city of San Francisco is on hold, Google trumpets its success providing free internet service to the much smaller city of Mountain View, some 30 miles to the south.
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Oversold technology, under-priced fees Citywide Wi-Fi was supposed to be the lifeline that would lead Earthlink to higher ground. With two of major deals suddenly declared dead and a third on suicide watch, it's starting to look like a ball and chain.â¦
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City officials have scrapped plans to blanket the city of Chicago with an ambitious Wi-Fi network, citing costs and that too few residents would use it, as the principal reasons.
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With EarthLink no longer pushing into the municipal Wi-Fi business, the wireless network it previously wanted to build in San Francisco likely won't happen.
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Among the 900 layoffs announced by Earthlink is John Berryman, the vice president in charge of Earthlink's municipal Wi-Fi projects. Under his wing was a high-profile project to blanket San Francisco with wireless connectivity.
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After Earthlink and Google scrapped plans to offer wireless in the city, many weren't so sure. But a start-up is promising to finish the job.
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Wireless networking startup Meraki plans to deliver free wireless Internet access, supported by advertising, across San Francisco by the end of the year, it announced Friday.An earlier&#160;attempt by Google and EarthLink&#160;to offer&#160;free city-wide Wi-Fi access in San Francisco&#160;foundered in August when&#160;EarthLink pulled out. They had planned a two-tier service, with faster, paid access provided by EarthLink and a more limited, advertising-funded service to be offered by Google. The search engine giant is also an investor in Meraki.Meraki will base the service on an existing project covering parts of the city, Free the Net, which has signed up 40,000 users over an area of 5 square kilometers since it began last March.To avoid the need for extensive cabling, Meraki will build the backbone of the network using a mesh network of solar-powered wireless repeaters installed on rooftops. The nodes will use some of their wireless capacity to offer Internet access to those nearby, and the rest to haul traffic back, via adjacent nodes, to the network&#39;s core.The company is looking for city residents willing to put a repeater on their roof. Those hosting a repeater will get free access to the service -- but so will their neighbors -- although for them, the signal may not be as strong. Although devices are shared, Meraki aims to deliver data rates of around 1Mbps&#160; to each user.Meraki will pay the cost of rolling out the service, and no public funds are involved, it said. Investors have offered the company an additional $20 million in venture capital to fund the move, it announced Friday.Ozone in Paris offers a similar wireless Internet service based on a network of wireless repeaters. Its service is only free for those who host repeaters, though: others must pay &#8364;18 ($26) a month.