Forbes believes so: The finalists are EarthLink and HP, which lead consortiums of other players. The writer is a little lazy, giving EarthLink the leg up as an ISP without noting that HP has a massive services business which, among other things, builds enterprise-scale wireless and wired networks. And HP has partnered with Business Information Group (BIG), which itself has a lot of experience in this area.
No company has built a high-speed mesh-based metropolitan-area network of the scale of Philadelphia's, although many smaller networks with more or less area but a much lower predicted user base are deployed.
Tropos, by the way, is a winner regardless of who Wireless Philadelphia chooses: they are the mesh vendor of choice for both HP and EarthLink's plans.