Question: What ever happened to municipal Wi-Fi?

Answer: Not much.

Unless you want to count Earthlink's announcement today that it will discontinue its municipal wireless network in Philadelphia, an experiment once touted as a new model of low-cost, public wireless access in cities.

After it became clear that the project would cost more than Earthlink had originally anticipated, the company sought to sell the $17 million network to a nonprofit group.

That effort fell through "due to unresolved issues among the city, Wireless Philadelphia and the nonprofit," Earthlink said. Wireless Philadelphia is the organization in charge of managing the network. Earthlink did not say which nonprofit it had approached.

Earthlink said it would ask a federal judge to allow it to remove its equipment from city streetlights and cap its liability for the failed project at $1 million.

Earthlink's decision to shutter the network is the latest blow to the ailing effort to introduce low-cost or free wireless networks in cities. Last year, the company backed out of a similar program in San Francisco, but that effort has been revived by start-up Meraki, which is partly funded by Google.

Glenn Fleishman, the editor of Wi-Fi Network News, suggested that Earthlink's Philadelphia project was doomed from the start.

"The failure in Philadelphia, and EarthLink's exiting the entire muni-Fi business, represents the end of a bad model in which a company agreed to assume all risk and costs associated with building a public access network," Fleishman wrote today.

"When the assumptions were that networks would be cheaper and easier to build in 2005 and that citizens in many larger cities had few affordable broadband options, it made some sense to build a network on spec," Fleishman added.

"Three years into this, however, it's clear that that capital investment is two to three times higher than what was anticipated to reach a level of service quality that people will expect," Fleishman continued. At the same time, he noted, DSL and cable operators have been willing to slash prices to battle competition.

Besides, Fleishman concluded, "wireless broadband delivered via Wi-Fi isn't the best of ideas for indoor service."

by Sam Gustin