The Cloud can't even give away its City of London Wi-Fi: The network covering London's business district, "The Square Mile," attracted 6,000 registered users in the first month, out of a working and visiting population of 350,000. There's a kind of mismatch. There aren't that many devices for which mobile Wi-Fi is useful yet. People come to the City to work, and thus have Wi-Fi at work. Those who roam the area probably already carry 3G smartphones.

Wi-Fi Planet rounds up the several delayed or troubled Wi-Fi projects covering cities: They review Aurora, Ill.; Wireless Silicon Valley; and Toledo, Ohio. More specifics below from local articles.

Toledo, Ohio, may agree to buy $2.2m in services from MetroFi in exchange for network: The city says they will divert between $225,000 and $325,000 in current costs (roughly $1.5m assuming no increases in current service costs) from existing expenses to the new network. The article says that revenue from advertising would offset the city's expenses, but that doesn't sound like MetroFi's model. I have a query into the company for clarification. The local paper is owned by a firm that also made an offer to build Toledo's network, but the city said their proposal didn't meet the mark as "it was a set of ideas," said the city's IT/telecom director. Update: I confirmed with MetroFi that the paper is reporting the deal inaccurately. The $2.16m would be for contracted services, and revenue MetroFi receives would not apply towards that.

Aurora, Ill., continues to find utility poles standing in network's way: Local paper reports that the city's CTO says that after a year of talks between MetroFi and ComEd, there's still no agreement in place. MetroFi discovered it would need to use many more poles than originally expected.