It’s been a long time coming but Earthlink just emailed us to say it has reached an agreement with San Francisco over the terms of the contract for the city-wide WiFi deal. Now all those vocal local critics can renew their protesting. It’s not quite the end of the line for Earthlink, though, as the deal has to be approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Hopefully that won’t take too long and the company can start building the network this year. We don’t know much of the details at this hour on a Friday, but we’ll bring you more as we know more.

(Disclosure: Earthlink is an advertiser on the GigaOM network.)