Wi-Fi goes bye-bye by Claudia Sonea

Like always officials are promising more than they can actually do. Doubtful from the beginning the plan of municipal Wi-Fi has now come to its peak and that means its end. Except Wireless Philadelphia who succeeded to cover 135 square kilometers, offering to 300 low-income residences laptops and Internet access for 10 dollars/ month and internet access in many parks for 20 dollars/ month, the rest of the cities were forced to give up because of economical issues. I know this is not new for anyone, but in deed San Francisco and Chicago halted plans and even Earthlink backed up. So both cities and companies are finding difficult from the economical point of view to use Wi-Fi technology for "digital inclusion" programs for low-income residents. Earthlink was offering a Wi-Fi program for San Francisco and had Google support. They offered a free access in exchange of viewing ads and pay for an add-free version. But they pulled back on the last minute and according to Rolla Huff, EarthLink president and chief executive, told a conference call with analysts the reason was the model it is not profitable. Daryl Schoolar, senior analyst at the research firm In-Stat confirms the fact that it is a very unstable market, while Jeff Kagan, an independent telecom industry analyst and Stan Schatt, analyst with ABI Research state that the true problem is to find a business model that works. Despite all this there are some new wireless technologies among which WIMAX has a longer range for each access point; Spint Nextel and Clearwire is about to release it in US and abroad. This might be the answer and how Kagan said they are only at the beginning with the Wi-Fi network, so it will take some time until they will get a model that works for both the cities and the companies, because in the end it is all reduced to one factor: profitability.

related story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20070923/tbs-lifestyle-us-internet-it-8cc5291_1.html

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

PocketNews is a new real-time news broadcaster delivering the latest and hottest news right to your pocket ! With global clients who want to be kept up to date, PocketNews is everyone's way of keeping in touch with the World.