Earthlink officially launched its MuniFi network in Milpitas, California today. The 10-square mile network is the company’s second live network in California after Anaheim (maybe some day San Francisco will get there too.) For the occasion the company is offering free WiFi service for 30 days and is having a wire cutting ceremony at the Milpitas City Hall around noon today.
Milpitas residents can get a WiFi subscription for $21.95 per month and visitors and casual users of the network can pay $3.95 for a one-hour pass or $15.95 for a three-day pass (ouch). Earthlink also says the network will be used by the city, businesses and wholesale providers. Craig Settles, who follows the MuniFi industry closely, thinks the Milpitas launch will be interesting because:
“we should see creative applications that influence automation of the nation’s 2 million mobile local government workers, particularly influencing both health services delivery and economic development.”
We think it’ll be interesting just to see how popular the network is with the residents. Everyone talks about the industry but there still aren’t that many of these networks that have been live for very long. We’ll go check out the network and fill in more details.
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1 trackback so far
11:00 AM PT
Wi-Fi Launch And 30 Days Free In Milpitas…
Today we proudly launched our Wi-Fi network in the city of Milpitas, CA…
6 comments so far
11:56 AM PT
Hasn’t Google done the same thing in Mountain View? I know I’ve connected to it before, but not sure if it’s city-wide…
12:57 PM PT
Wow, next time I’m at Milan Chatwalla’s having the sizzler, I’ll be able to read GigaOm too!
1:19 PM PT
okay, all talk of indian food is banned. i cannot find it here in san francisco, so basically i would not listen to any of the food talk ;-)
1:38 PM PT
There is too great Indian food in SF. Try Tandoori Mahal at Kearny and Columbus! It’s a small buffet with butter chicken to die for.
9:21 PM PT
Checkout the draft contract between San Francisco and Earthlink.
Oddly they are writing it in a way that the city is obtaining no wireless services from EarthLink.
This is unlike most other municipal wifi rollouts which use the city as an anchor tenant to fund their rollout.
This is probably smoke and mirrors so that the city can politically say they are spending no money on the deal and then as soon as it goes through they’ll issue a sole source contract for um city wifi services to help EarthLink fund the deal.
6:16 PM PT
I’d have to have really solid city-wide serice which worked well from my home to consider 21.95 / month. Unfortunately, this is the sort of network which is hard to test on a comparative basis since you pretty much need a home or office in the covered area.
I tried really hard to utilize MetroFi in Cupertino including purchasing the recommended roof top access device. When they got all their devices actually working, I found it still wasn’t reliable. It was impossible to manage. Their network wasn’t designed properly for the Tranzeo AP devices they recommended, etc. There was no way to have a management session with the Tranzeo device AND be online at the same time. I spent hours on the phone with Tranzeo tech support and much more time interacting with MetroFi support.
I don’t know the details of the Earthlink setup in Milpitas, but I know that MetroFi needs at least 4X APs to get adequate coverage. They also need a system solution that doesn’t take a network engineer to keep a home connection working.
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