By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
June 12, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — While other cities such as Philadelphia, Santa Clara and San Jose are discontinuing their municipal Wi-Fi systems, San Francisco is planning to offer free city-wide wireless service by the year’s end, said the city’s mayor yesterday.
The Haight-Ashbury and the Mission District areas have already gone wireless under the “Free The Net” mesh network project. Run by Meraki, the company also pays for the research project while being backed by such technology giants as Google.
Mayor Gavin Newsom said the Free The Net project will be expanded to all San Francisco residents by the end of the year.
The city has previously attempted to set up a municipal wireless network through a joint venture with Google and Earthlink, but the deal fell through after privacy concerns and funding issues.
This time around, the project is arguably poised for success, with Meraki picking up the tab and Google taking a step back in its role, which could possibly distract those privacy concerns.
Meanwhile, other municipal wireless networks have been quickly dying off, one by one, with Earthlink ending its Philadelphia deployment. The company offered to sell the infrastructure to any company willing to take over but failed to find a buyer.
California’s MetroFi is also pulling the plug on its networks in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino and San Jose on June 20.
Other cities around the world have contemplated the idea of providing a free, low-bandwidth Wi-Fi service to residents, with many of them going as far as actually deploying the service, only to go bankrupt months later.
Last September, Comodo announced it would deploy free wireless Internet access to residents and visitors in the South Wedge/Rochester community in Rochester, New York through Rochester Digital Ripple. Additionally, EarthLink announced last year it would build, own and operate Arlington County, Virginia’s Wi-Fi broadband network.
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