The Philadelphia Story Closing its Doors.

Well we should say Earthlink is closing its doors to the Muni deal it had with Philadelphia. We will go on record that we think that Muni WiFi is still a viable model. But the business arrangement that was sign on to was flawed. The presence of Philly politics did not help much either. But we report it here all the time the success stories of smaller cities are having with Muni. The concept and technology are valid.

We concluded that the private franchise model was suboptimal and that Philadelphia’s solution was problematic in a number of ways. At the time, we received good press coverage and a helluvalot of blowback from certain constituencies (who continued to assert that everything was on track).

Now that we’ve made it to May, 2008, Wireless Philadelphia is on its last legs. While many of us are still working to salvage something from this mess, reading through the New America Foundation report, it’s amazingly how eerily prescient it is. Ironically, the solution we proposed was exactly what has been on the table for the past couple months — but, as with far too many innovative ideas, this one got mired in the muck of Philly politics and, perhaps, personal egos.

Sadly, the mainstream press continue to demonstrate a remarkable ignorance by tagging this failure as a failure of “municipal wireless” — the reality is, the Philadelphia model is a corporate franchise granted to Earthlink — much of the problem stems from the fact that the municipality has no control or ownership over the network and Earthlink has demonstrated no accountability to the local community. Conde Nast’s Portfolio gets it completely wrong — heading their story, “Another Municipal Wi-Fi Plan Dies” — which is a particular shame since I’ve spoken with the article’s author, Sam Gustin, previously and he knows better.

Sad state of affairs. Now maybe a proper community-enterprise set up can occur. But ya got to get the politics under control.

Linky.