Comments on: Free San Francisco Wi-Fi project dies

EarthLink has backed out of a deal to build San Francisco's free citywide Wi-Fi service.

[WJeansonne]

Ha, ha. Socialist Gov't of S.F. Gets What it Deserves

That will teach those rascals or bureaucrats in that VERY socialist government a thing or two by trying leverage its position to obtain undeserved benefits. I just have to laugh.

[Stating]

Board Of Stuporvisors

The SF Board of Stuporvisors racks up yet another success. They would rather give the voters nothing while they diddle around with their Marxist agenda.

[wayne95125]

Not the Socialist supervisors fault

Earthlink's ambitions to provide municipal WI-FI networks died
when their former CEO Betty died. As much as I hate to admit it
the city supervisors are not totally at fault for this melt down.
Earthlink has come to their senses and is trying to bail out of these
deals. The business model makes no sense. It is very doubtful that
Earthlink would have ever made any money on this deal. The
opposite is probably true, they would have spent a fortune with
little or no hope of ever breaking even.

[Stating]

But They Stalled The Talks

The Stuporvisors stalled the talks with Earthlink for over a year. If they got on the stick while the getting was good, SF would have WiFi today. Instead, the pols dicked around making vendors jump through hoops, and so this is what happened. Good luck now SF trying to get another vendor step in. I sure wouldn't. Even tiny Pacifica has wireless service. SF is an embarassment.

[sirdavefl]

WiFi

Sorry to hear that earthlink is trying to back out. I am all for wireless. just think if they charged $20.00 a month. Earthlink would make profit. I like to see SF move ahead and look to google to help out with Wi-Fi.

Dave Baker
http://davecmu7.com

[solrosenberg]

The long slow death of the muni Wi-Fi pipe dream

Muni Wi-Fi always was an idiotic idea. Stupid politicians saw the el cheapo Wi-Fi routers at Best Buy and assumed it's just as easy as buying a truckload of them and putting them on utility poles. Opportunistic vendors lined up at the government teat. But the hard truth is Wi-Fi was never designed for these types of deployments. The power of Wi-Fi, which bureaucrats not surprisingly never really grasped, is the ad-hoc decentralized deployment model. But saying "let the users build their own networks" doesn't win votes and also doesn't fit the command and control model of your typical government official.