Posted on October 23, 2006 at 3:18 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 The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
There was a New Orleans Times-Picayune story last week about the city's plan to take down the current Wi-Fi hardware as part of the development of EarthLink's new network, and today Katie Fehrenbacher from GigaOm wrote an entry about it after speaking to Clifton Roscoe, our city General Manager. There was no particular news here other than the fact that our development efforts in New Orleans are taking shape on the ground. In the original press release and in my coverage on Earthling, it was spelled out that a free tier of service would be available throughout the city's rebuilding efforts and not permanently.
Our network infrastructure will be a definite improvement over what the city has currently, and I feel that more is being made of the removal of current city radios than should be. For one thing, we won't be removing the city hardware until our network is up and running. For another, New Orleans is a unique situation for us, and it's the only city where we're offering our own free tier of service. On the San Francisco network, our partner Google will be providing and supporting their own free service as one of our anchor tenants. We're proud to be able to offer this special arrangement for New Orleans during the rebuilding period.
Further, when Katie discusses the timeline of the temporary free tier of service, I think her conclusion doesn't match her paraphrased quote from Clifton. In the second-to-last paragraph, she writes:
When asked about how long the temporary free service would be offered, Roscoe said the company would revisit the decision in the second half of next year. So, probably only a few more months of free for New Orleans residents.
I'm not sure how the conclusion that "probably only a few more months of free" follows from Clifton's statement that the length of time the EarthLink free tier would be available will be evaluated in about a year's time. I spoke to Clifton this afternoon and he confirmed that a characterization of "a few months" of free service is not accurate, and his statement was meant to indicate that the service would operate at least until a determination is made in the second half of next year.