Plug pulled on Philly wi-fi

Alas.

Question: What ever happened to municipal Wi-Fi?

Answer: Not much.

Unless you want to count Earthlink's announcement today that it will discontinue its municipal wireless network in Philadelphia, an experiment once touted as a new model of low-cost, public wireless access in cities.

After it became clear that the project would cost more than Earthlink had originally anticipated, the company sought to sell the $17 million network to a nonprofit group.

That effort fell through "due to unresolved issues among the city, Wireless Philadelphia and the nonprofit," Earthlink said. Wireless Philadelphia is the organization in charge of managing the network. Earthlink did not say which nonprofit it had approached.

Earthlink said it would ask a federal judge to allow it to remove its equipment from city streetlights and cap its liability for the failed project at $1 million.

Well, with Houston out of the picture, this is more of academic interest than anything else. Sort of the end of an era, really. Glenn Fleischmann sums it up.

If someone offered you $17m of outdated equipment on a network that never worked to specification that wasn't completed, and that already had known high annual costs, and which a private firm gave up as a bad job that they couldn't turn a dime on--would you take that deal? No. EarthLink will ultimately have to pay much more than $1m, I predict, and I suspect some of the settlement will leave gear in selected neighborhoods behind for more modest networking purposes. It's not going to be as easy as releasing a press release, although I haven't read the contract's provisions for this set of circumstances, and I'm not a lawyer.

The failure in Philadelphia, and EarthLink's exiting the entire muni-Fi business, represents the end of a bad model in which a company agreed to assume all risk and costs associated with building a public access network. When the assumptions were that networks would be cheaper and easier to build in 2005, and that citizens in many larger cities had few affordable broadband options, it made some sense to build a network on spec.

Three years into this, however, it's clear that that capital investment is 2 to 3 times higher than what was anticipated to reach a level of service quality that people will expect; that, when presented with potential competition, DSL and cable operators will slash prices and offer cheap 1-year or "lifetime" rates with long-term contracts; and that wireless broadband delivered via Wi-Fi isn't the best of ideas for indoor service.

If it contributed even in some small way to getting DSL and cable operators to slash prices and offer cheap longterm rates, then this was not a complete failure, though I suppose that's not of much comfort to EarthLink. Whether wi-fi was the best way to deliver this or not, I still think it's a worthy goal to make ubiquitous connectivity a reality. Dwight always thought it should be considered by cities to be a utility and delivered as a public service for free. Maybe that would have been a better way to go, assuming a reasonable cost model was possible. Maybe that will still happen in some form some day. For now, we've got some bubbles and that's about it. Thanks to Mr. Crap on Twitter (see, I told you this thing was more useful than you'd think) for the heads up.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on May 14, 2008 to Technology, science, and math