Last night, the city council in Corpus Christi, Texas, voted 7-0 to ditch a contract that sold its Wi-Fi network to EarthLink. Corpus Christi had signed the contract with EarthLink in March 2007, when the ISP agreed to pay $5.3 million, plus an additional $340,000, during the first year of service. EarthLink also agreed to pay the city $1.59 million over the course of the next three years.
But less than a year after the relationship was formed, EarthLink began its flight from municipal Wi-Fi networks, leaving the fate of the city’s contract uncertain. Corpus Christi had built out a fully functioning network to provide meter reading, emergency response services and other city-related applications. It does not try to provide free wireless broadband access to citizens, and sold the network to EarthLink so it could provide broadband to residents for a fee.
An assistant city manager told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times that, under the city-proposed plan, EarthLink would not have to pay out the $1.59 million, but that the city would get almost $3 million in improvements to the network, as well as equipment, as part of EarthLink’s exit. While it will cost the city $50,000 a year to operate the network, it just wants to get out of an uncertain situation. Why wait to be dumped when you can do the walking?
5 comments so far
1:07 PM PT
[...] Corpus Christi to reclaim network: The city council voted 7-0 last night to take its Wi-Fi network back over from EarthLink. As noted yesterday, EarthLink avoids paying $1.59m in fees to the city, but the city gets $3m in improvements, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional equipment. The improbably amount of $50,000 in yearly operating expense was once again bandied about in this GigaOm report. [...]
1:14 PM PT
[...] Corpus Christi to reclaim network: The city council voted 7-0 last night to take its Wi-Fi network back over from EarthLink. As noted yesterday, EarthLink avoids paying $1.59m in fees to the city, but the city gets $3m in improvements, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional equipment. The improbably amount of $50,000 in yearly operating expense was once again bandied about in this GigaOm report. [...]
2:21 PM PT
[...] Corpus Christi to reclaim network: The city council voted 7-0 last night to take its Wi-Fi network back over from EarthLink. As noted yesterday, EarthLink avoids paying $1.59m in fees to the city, but the city gets $3m in improvements, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional equipment. The improbably amount of $50,000 in yearly operating expense was once again bandied about in this GigaOm report. Milpitas also releases EarthLink, accepts its network. [...]
7:35 PM PT
[...] They say that breaking up is hard to do . . . but the city council in Corpus Christi did it anyway this week. They’ve dumped Earthlink as the city’s municipal Wi-Fi provider after less than a year. Read about it on Gigaom. [...]
1:47 PM PT
[...] on advertising. There were a few others that have found going really tough when it comes to MuniFi. The trials and tribulations of EarthLink are well known by now. Glenn Fleishman blames EarthLink for the current spate of [...]
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