San Fransisco citywide WiFi projects a dream?
By MaxW on Sep 3, 2007 in Wireless
In the past few years, covering cities with WiFi signals has been viewed as a cheap solution for bringing affordable and free broadband access to cities.
Earthlink and Google have teamed up to blanket San Fransisco with WiFi, but just last week Earthlink announced a massive restructuring cutting 900 jobs, or nearly half of the employees to reduce costs. Eathlink canceled their contracts to build the WiFi networks in Houston and San Fransisco, blaming it on the fact that the city changed the contract to eight years from the 16 years originally agreed upon.
Sonic.net, a Santa Rosa, CA-based independent ISP that uses gear from Meraki Networks (a wireless hardware company based in Mountain View, CA), is trying to promote a ad-supported MuniFi model. Sonic.net emailed its customers today notifying them that they can get a Meraki wireless mesh router at a subsidized cost, which would let the customers share up to 500 kbps of their DSL line bandwidth.
Users of the new network will see a Google ad bar at the top of the browser, Sonic.net plans to share the revenue generated by the ads with the customers that chose to place the router on their connection, and will be credited on their bill.
