EarthLink to build out full Philadelphia Wi-Fi network
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InfoWorld - The sun came out for EarthLink&#39;s Philadelphia Wi-Fi network on Thursday even as prospects for&#160;its San Francisco project&#160;remain shrouded in fog.
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Proposed municipal Wi-Fi network would be run by EarthLink, include Google service.
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SBC is planning to offer a Wi-Fi service that will enable subscribers to receive high-speed wireless access to the Internet at 3,900 airports, hotels, restaurants and other so-called &quot;hot spots&quot; across the country.
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By Bridget Carey, The Miami Herald  Sep. 13--Hoping to lure BellSouth customers, EarthLink is entering the South Florida Internet and phone service market this month.
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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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(InfoWorld) - San Francisco is going to kick the tires of an alternative to theÂ citywide Wi-Fi planÂ from EarthLink and Google. The budget analyst of the City and County of San Francisco agreed on Monday to study to financial feasibility of a wireless network paid for and owned by the city. The agency expects to finish its report by December, a representative said at a meeting Monday of the Board of Supervisors' Government Audit and Oversight Committee. The city's Wi-Fi plan and the process of developing it has come under fire from several quarters, not least from some members of the Board of Supervisors. Supervisor Jake McGoldrick formally requested the feasibility study after criticizing the way in which the administration of Mayor Gavin Newsom settled on theÂ EarthLink-Google plan. It calls for a network to be built at no cost to the city and owned by the two service providers. "It really got rammed and jammed and fast-tracked," McGoldrick said in April. If the city owned the network, he believes it would have more control overÂ issues such as user privacyÂ and prompt upgrading of the technology. The analyst's plan to deliver the report by December satisfied McGoldrick, who talked with representatives of the agency at Monday's meeting. The city also expects to wrap up its negotiations with EarthLink and Google in early December, said Brian Roberts, a senior policy analyst for the city's Department of Telecommunications and Information Services. The department has no position on the plan for the feasibility study, he said: The budget analyst's report will give the supervisors more information to decide whether to go with the EarthLink-Google deal, he said. Also Monday, a nonprofit organization said a city-owned network would pay for itself in just over four years. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) released the results of a feasibility study report that was sought by Media Alliance, an Oakland, California, group that has pushed for broader access to technology. ILSR envisioned San Francisco building the network for an initial capital investment of about $10 million, to be repaid over five years from services revenue. The city would create a nonprofit body to sell access to the network to service providers wholesale. Upgrades would cost about $9 million over ten years, the group said. The plan is similar to onesÂ advocated in some other cities, such as that of the Boston Wireless Task Force. ILSR said its estimates, which in part assume that 10 percent of households and businesses would become paid subscribers at about $15 per month, were conservative. A better plan would be for the city to expand its current 43-mile fiber network to eventually reach all homes, while deploying wireless in certain areas in the meantime, ILSR said. Fiber costs more to deploy but less to maintain. The city didn't provide enough information for a complete analysis of this plan, ILSR said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Prepares to enter broadband era with Wi-Fi adaptor
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Meraki Networks&#39; plan to cover San Francisco with free Wi-Fi, with residents&#39; help, could be a way around the political and business barriers some municipal wireless projects have run into.The startup, partly funded by Google, believes it will succeed&#160;where EarthLink and Google did not: Building Wi-Fi access throughout San Francisco at no cost to the city. It expects to finish by year&#39;s end, filling the whole city with 1Mbps coverage.The catch is that Meraki is footing the whole bill on this project so that&#160;it can learn how to roll out such networks for profit elsewhere. The good news, if the plan works, is that it could do so for less than $5 million, lower than the cost many other municipal wireless projects have run into. That&#39;s partly because of intelligence in access points and software, making the network more robust with fewer nodes, according to Meraki spokeswoman Erika Shaffer.Meraki will build the backbone of its network with solar-powered rooftop access points and fill out its coverage with smaller repeaters to sit in windows or on balconies. Both will be designed and built by Meraki and provided free to residents and businesses that agree to house the gear on their property in return for better coverage. All the nodes will be meshed, so Meraki won&#39;t have to get wired broadband links everywhere its access points go.The idea has potential in developing countries with little broadband, where Meraki sees its biggest market, but also in highly wired cities such as San Francisco, analysts said.A key advantage is that by asking users instead of the city for mounting rights for its gear, Meraki will bypass the rancorous political fights over contract terms like the one that slowed down EarthLink&#39;s initiative last year. But seeking volunteers also makes sure that however fully Meraki has actually covered the city by the end of the year, it is pretty sure to have coverage where people actually want it.&quot;You know exactly where your coverage needs to be, because someone just asked you for a repeater,&quot; said IDC analyst Godfrey Chua.Meraki believes it won&#39;t have any trouble getting people to host repeaters in their homes, based on its existing test networks in parts of San Francisco, Shaffer said. There are about 500 repeaters today, and about 40,000 people have used the network, she said.Another problem that would seem to solve itself, assuming the network and distribution system run smoothly, is the difficult issue of indoor coverage, said Craig Settles, an independent municipal network analyst at Successful.com. EarthLink&#39;s network was to be built largely on streetlights and electricity poles, which are well suited to mobile outdoor coverage, but not so good for providing home broadband to residents who can&#39;t afford wired alternatives, Settles said. Meraki&#39;s small repeaters are designed for indoor coverage in the home where they&#39;re located as well as to flesh out the whole network.On the San Francisco network, which Meraki will treat as a research and development cost, the company will test advertising as a possible revenue source for future deployments. When it approaches service providers that want to charge for access, it will also offer a billing system. Meraki has trials going on today with carriers in developing countries, Shaffer said.In places where most people don&#39;t yet have broadband, Meraki&#39;s approach could be an attractive low-cost alternative, analysts said. However, WiMax, which requires far fewer base stations than Wi-Fi because it has a longer range, also has relatively low costs and is already a competitor in those markets, Chua said.&quot;I doubt that Wi-Fi would be the dominant access medium in emerging markets,&quot; Chua said.
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Boston's plan to blanket the city with wireless Internet connections is set to pick up speed this month as companies jockey to play a role and a pilot WiFi project gets underway in a square-mile area of the Grove Hall neighborhood.
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Earthlink Inc. , the Internet  service provider, said on Friday it has won approval from the  New Orleans City Council to build a wireless high-speed  Internet network in the city.
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The city of Houston said Tuesday it had struck a deal with Earthlink Inc. to build a citywide wireless Internet network that would eventually be the nation's largest at about 600 square miles.
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(InfoWorld) - San Francisco city officials could bring the city'sÂ proposed Wi-Fi networkÂ closer to reality at two meetings this week as a key leader proposes significant changes to the plan. The network, to be run by EarthLink, has been closely watched because it is one of the biggest of many proposed municipal networks in the U.S. and because it would include a free service offered by Google. The city would sell EarthLink access to some of its streetlight poles and other locations for Wi-Fi access points. Some leaders and activists in the famously liberal city haveÂ slammed the dealÂ on issues including privacy and service and called for a network owned by the city. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors will reconsider an April decision by the city's Planning Department to exempt the network from an environmental review. The San Francisco Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union (SNAFU) appealed the April ruling, saying the access points could cause health problems. The board could let the Planning Department's decision stand, strike it down or decide to study the issue further. On Wednesday, the Board's Budget and Finance committee will vote on the full Wi-Fi proposal. Unless the vote Tuesday requires an environmental review, the only remaining hurdle then would be a vote by the full board. The Budget and Finance panel will hear proposals by board President Aaron Peskin that may boost support for the politically troubled plan. Both the mayor's office and EarthLink are aware of the proposals, Peskin said in an e-mail interview. The mayor's office seems to approve of them, but Peskin doesn't know where EarthLink stands. Peskin's ideas affect aspects of the proposed contract that have drawn much of the fire. Key points include: - Increase the speed of the free service from 300Kbps to 500Kbps. (A service priced at about $20 per month would still deliver 1Mbps.) - Provide for user privacy on the free service. - Add an enforceable requirement that the network provide adequate service in all areas of the city. - Shorten the maximum term of the contract from 16 to eight years and let the city buy the network at full market value at that time. As it stands, the contract initially would be for four years and could be renewed three times, an eternity in the world of wireless technology. - Ensure the city is properly compensated for giving EarthLink access to its light poles. The city and EarthLink settled on the terms of a contract in January. It gave EarthLink the right to pull out if the plan wasn't approved by the Board within 180 days. That time has passed, according to EarthLink spokesman Jerry Grasso, but the company hasn't given up. The plan calls for building a two-square mile test network first before deploying the whole system. Â
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Will launch a fixed wireless service in a 'major city' next year
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The city of Philadelphia plans to invest in a new wireless mesh network based on the Wi-Fi 802.11b standard, and officials hope to turn the 135-square-mile city into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot.
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Molasses for free, lightning for a king's ransom As doubts grow over the approval of San Francisco's proposed deal to build a citywide wireless network with EarthLink, critics of the effort are putting forth alternatives. Like the current plan, negotiated behind closed doors between Mayor Gavin Newsom and the ISP, none of them are anywhere near perfect.â¦
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THE REGION Officials running Boston's wireless Internet program are expecting dozens of vendors, systems integrators, and service providers to respond by Friday to a request for information on how they could contribute to a citywide WiFi network, said Pam Reeve , chief executive of OpenAirBoston, the nonprofit corporation running the program. A pilot wireless program covering 1.1 square miles in ...
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WiMax technology, including a module that goes inside a wiring closet and work alongside cellular, Wi-Fi and public safety networks, will be shown at this week's WiMax World conference in Chicago.