The city fathers of Philadelphia have thumbed their noses at the telcos by selecting Earthlink to deploy a low cost wi-fi network that will completely blanket 135 square miles of the city. Red Herring reports that Earthlink beat Hewlett-Packard to snag the contract. There is definitely heavy momentum this week building on the side of municipalities as on Monday San Francisco announced that twenty-four providers had answered his call for proposals including -ahem- Google.
Google, of course, is bringing their unique intelligence and business model to the project by offering their own secure client, free universal access (free access is capped at 300kbps), partnerships with ISPs to provide full speed access, and the future implementation of location based advertising.
Companies are certainly starting to realize just what a competitive market citywide Wi-Fi contracts really are.
One of the reasons for this, or course, is the potential for these contracts to go far beyond Wi-Fi. Companies who win these contrats have the opportunity to open up whole new communication channels within cities.
EarthLink, for example, is planning to start their own Wi-Fi cellular service…
Comment by Jeremy Maddock — October 7, 2005 @ 5:07 pm