Philadelphia’s Public WiFi Experiment Ends In Failure
It fails almost two years to the day that the service was originally announced.
EarthLink, which once pinned its future on municipal networks such as Philadelphia’s following rapid declines in its dial-up Internet access business, said Tuesday that it could not find a buyer for the $17 million network and that talks to give it to either the city or a nonprofit organization had failed.
City officials have said it would cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year to operate the network.
“It’s been an unfortunate situation,” Chief Executive Officer Rolla Huff told The Associated Press. “It was a great idea a few years ago, ... but it’s an idea that simply didn’t make it.”
So why is the venture failing?
But the technology itself proved to be difficult to deploy and, at times, unreliable. EarthLink later admitted that its Wi-Fi business model had not panned out.
Really? Providing the public with an unlimited supply of internet at a fixed rate from the city wasn’t a good business model? I’m shocked.
I could have told them that before they even tried it. And some of us are still trying to tell the proponents of universal health care the same thing about government-run hospitals and clinic.
Meanwhile, internet service providers operating in a free market around the country continue to have no problems meeting customer demand.
