OK, so, just thinking out loud here. Remember how we were supposed to be the first major american city to have a pink cotton candy cloud of WiFi raining down nodes of info all over us? Well, it is now a festering sore, and it is growing synonomous with the Great Philadelphia Choke, that awful voodoo that hangs over our sports teams and politicians and is basically the sole reason for why we can’t have nice things. Says the New York Times, in a piece on deadlocked muni WiFi’s all over the country:

Part of the problem was in the business model established in Philadelphia and mimicked in so many other cities, Mr. Settles said.

In Philadelphia, the agreement was that the city would provide free access to city utility poles for the mounting of routers; in return the Internet service provider would agree to build the infrastructure for 23 free hotspots and to provide inexpensive citywide residential service, including 25,000 special accounts that were even cheaper for lower-income households.

But soon it became clear that dependable reception required more routers than initially predicted, which drastically raised the cost of building the networks. Marketing was also slow to begin, so paid subscribers did not sign up in the numbers that providers initially hoped, Mr. Phillis said.

If you’ve been following this story, none of this should be news, but what is new here is the notion that the model for the epic WiFi fail now belongs to us. And it’s incumbent upon the new Mayor’s administration to MAKE ROCKET GO NOW. And hopefully to do so in a way that, again, other cities could copy. So maybe it’s litigation against Earthlink, who really did fuck this city royally. Maybe it’s giving another provider some kind of tax break in exchange for tithing their networks in poorer areas. Hell, maybe it’s a matter of the City just finding a warehouse somewhere, setting up its own server farm and hiring a bunch of geeks to show us and the rest of the country that getting people free or cheap internet access really, really should not be this hard.
NYT: New Model Army
Previously: Technologicology Special Report: Like A Pussy Boyfriend, Earthlink Finally Breaks It Off With Wireless Philadelphia
Owie: City Hall CIO Confirms (Again) That Wireless Philadelphia Now At Standstill

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 11:24 am.