Comments on: EarthLink's woes put free muni Wi-Fi in peril

EarthLink says it can't afford to foot the bill to build citywide Wi-Fi networks, jeopardizing cities' plans to provide low-income residents with affordable broadband.

[jacomo]

Tired of Hearing about this

Same thing over and over again. Earthlink picked wrong technology for big city networks, developed a business case based on a network design that doubled in costs when deployed and continued to believe their own spin. The analysts continued to focus on the big name Providers and their big Cities wins instead of the technology being used, the struggle with poor network performance and the business cases these providers were using to justify deployment. Networks were to be free to Muni and based on an Ad based source of revenue.
What happened to good business sense here??

The Wireless Broadband Network based on Mesh Systems is a sound business if done right with a Carrier Grade design and realistic expectations by all parties. The best and only approach here is true Private/Public Partnership where both parties share in design, development, operations and the risk associated with any network.
These events remind me of the Internet Bubble and how it burst when overhyped and then slowly recovered when level headed business men stepped in and developed the market.

Jacomo

[retroflask]

Oh boy here we go again

Earthlink...the dotcom failure that has yet to fail. This company is as dead as Betty. I mean if they lay off half the employees now won't that cause a recession in India?

[mitchbart]

It's just as well - Wi-Fi is the wrong technology for city wide deployment

It's just a well - the reality is Wi-Fi is not a practical technology to cover an entire city (esp. hilly San Francisco) and deployed cities are showing that. With the increasing speed, coverage and decreasing cost of mobile carrier 3G Technology and the deployment of WIMAX the Wi-fi "experiment" would have been a disaster anyway. It's best for the city to start to work on WIMAX deployment. Sprint/Clearwire's partnership Xohn starts next year the City should partner with them. Their service would actually be useful to the City services - I know the cities want to pay nothing but the various" city's officials should consider an "anchor tenancy" agreement with Xohn.

[stephen.m.thompson272]

Economics 101 lesson for EARTHLINK

Surely all of the incredibly smart folks at EARTHLINK must have known that free has never been a sustainable business plan. Plus Wi-Fi has too many technological shortcomings and challenges for a massive innercity build out.

Wi-Max, will provide a better solution to their current business challenges and the new business model is staring them right in the face.

Sometimes smart people are too smart for their own good.

[amy.licious]

Earthlink Is Finished

We used to have it (cable thru twc pipe, at 30% discounted) and it was great. Great senior techs to help y'all out right here in the USA. Great prices. Great web mail. Then their rotten email client (total access) & all it's spyware came out. None of us used it.

We stuck with their web mail. Then they offered the anti-spyware if you loaded their toolbar which shoved spyware (which their anti-spyware mystically didn't catch lol) in your registry. So you had to clean your registry. Then they put out their Protection Control Center PCC (Firewall, A/V & A/S) free to us paying customners. It ran SO MUCH CPU draw (and didn't work in the bargain lol) that it crashed otherwise powerful PC's regularly.

Then they offered some new doo-hickey to PCC which made it "totally protective" (google SANA). But even tho you were paying them at this point $50/mo for this new "improved" PCC with cable, they demanded an extra $5 or $10 / monthly for this useless SANA security thingey. And tiny memory limits on your web mail account (gmail tons for free, ditto yahoo mail now too so i hear).

The gall ~ we were (are?) only their "top paying customers"! They should've sold the company for a song a few years ago to someone like Google who used to love them and could bail out their lousy tech. But no... . And now it sounds like it's too late for them to make a deal.

Wi-Fi networks are mostly unencrypted and are easily hacked to steal personal information over the network. You can use VPN to secure it, but not SSL when like Earthlinks' your sign-in page & web mail pages are both only "partially encrypted" (bothersome ad's etc).

[netclift]

Why is this working in Minneapolis then?

See:
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/wirelessminneapolis/

[trisor]

Working?

From what I can tell, all that is actually working is the test area. The production/build out schedule is still listed as tentative even though it's 3 months into the schedule.