EarthLink snags second city: Anaheim, Calif.: EarthLink will build a 50-square-mile Wi-Fi network by late 2006; it will first develop a two-square-mile test. Another report indicated that this was to be a 20-year exclusive franchise agreement.
San Jose will expand slightly: The city favors incremental expansion of successful downtown and park Wi-Fi instead of a comprehensive plan. The city's IT manager noted that there's a movement to build Wi-Fi across all of Silicon Valley. Interestingly, "stakeholders" in San Jose thought a citywide plan should be left to private enterprise. Those stakeholders included public employees, writers, and companies like SBC. I don't quite understand how citizens were left out of that list, hmm?
I was at this city council meeting last night. Specifically, the motion was to declare the city's intention on giving Earthlink a 10-20 year franchise to install, operate, and maintain a wireless mesh.
An Earthlink representative provided a relatively superficial presentation, without a lot of technical details.
And most importantly, since the provider selection process was not made public, we don't know who else was in the running.
The public hearing on this is currently scheduled for November 15th, 2005, afterwhich if approved, shall Earthlink actually receive it's franchise.
Here is the city's agenda report on the Earthlink franchise, as provided by the city's manager.
http://www.anaheim.net/docs_agend/ag_3vers/05.PDF