Posted on February 23, 2006 at 3:55 PM in @earthlink
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
Whoah, mule. This week the news cart jumped out in front of the explanation horse. I have a bunch of stories I'm researching about the details of EarthLink's municipal wireless network projects in Philadelphia and Anaheim, but none of the stories were finished enough to publish yesterday when the news broke about us teaming up with Google in San Francisco to submit a joint bid.
The most interesting things to me about the Muni Wi-Fi projects are all of the challenges and solutions that come from putting pieces of the internet that are usually in cushy indoor environments outdoors in cities. As I've talked to some of the people on the Muni teams here this week, I've been repeatedly impressed by their stories about the technical and human snags they've run in to and the ways they've overcome them. For example, did you know that of all of the leaves on trees, pine needles are the worst for blocking wireless signals? It all sounds simple until you start to consider the scale and complexity of all of the various parts and systems and people working together to bring wireless internet capability to a whole community of people. More on that in upcoming days.
I was happy to oblige Corporate Communications and publish Don's statement yesterday, but now I feel like today I should go back and explain a little bit about the history of the San Francisco proposal for those of you who are just now learning about all of this Muni business.
The City of San Francisco's Tech Connect group put out an RFI/C (Request For Information / Comment) seeking companies interested in creating a wireless network throughout the city back in September.
EarthLink's response back then was independent and separate of Google’s. It offered to foot the bill to create a 1 megabit per second (both upstream for sending content up to the network and downstream for receiving content) network using equipment from Motorola and Tropos. The response estimated the cost to consumers around $20/month, and allowed for competing service providers to come in and sell access to the network. In other words, other companies could take EarthLink's network infrastructure and sell access to it on their own.
Google submitted their own response involving a free city-wide service. There were responses from many other companies as well.
As the next step in the process, Tech Connect then put out an RFP (Request For Proposal), which asks for a lot more specifics and a formal proposal.
After some discussion with our friends at Google we found that the best bet for everyone involved was to collaborate on building the same infrastructure, and offer different ways to access it. We've been working on city-wide wireless plans in Anaheim and Philadelphia, and are pleased to bring our expertise to the table for the San Francisco project.
All of the proposals submitted in response to the RFP can be found here. It's good bedtime reading.
Mark Perton at Engadget.com likes our chances:
”Given Earthlink's experience wiring other cities including Anaheim and Philadelphia, the partnership could all but guarantee that the SF government will choose GooLink over other bidders, which include both local companies and businesses backed by heavy hitters such as IBM and Cisco.”
GooLink. Heh. EarthLe.
Esme Vos from MuniWireless.com was not surprised by the EarthLink/Google joint bid.
Nathan Weinberg at Inside Google thinks the telcos (standard telephone companies) have reason to fear the new network, whoever builds it.
Special mention as well to Clickety-Clack, for contributing my favorite headline for the news.
Comments
"This week the news cart jumped out in front of the explanation horse" = best first sentence ever. Except it's the second sentence.
Posted by Tracy | February 23, 2006 6:38 PM