Philadelphia's WiFi in jeopardy

From CNET News -

The fate of Philadephia's Wi-Fi deployment is in limbo after provider EarthLink stopped accepting new customers last week and has supposedly given the city a deadline of this week to come up with a plan to take over the network or sell it to a third party.

EarthLink, which fronted $20 million to build the network and has completed 80% of the build-out, had previously aggressively pushed its municipal Wi-Fi strategy. But after the death of its CEO Garry Betty in early 2007, it had a change of heart. Within months, the company got out of several contracts with cities such as San Francisco and Houston. Early this year it announced it was abandoning the business altogether, and it started negotiating with five cities in which networks had already been built or partially built. The city governments of Corpus Christi, TX and Milpitas, CA decided to take ownership of the networks and run them themselves. But New Orleans, LA did not and will have its network dismantled starting May 18.

Source article here.