Life's Sweet With Muni Wi-FiLife's Sweet With Muni Wi-Fi

I'm sitting in a rented Dodge Magnum outside a Starbucks in a strip mall parking lot in downtown Anaheim, and … I've got an Internet connection! (And no, I'm not piggybacking on the T-Mobile for-fee access inside Starbucks.) This wonder of modern technology is being brought to me by EarthLink's new municipal network for Anaheim, which is being built out as we speak and is scheduled to be 80% complete by early summer. This is my first experience with muni wireless, and while both I and my colleagues have been fairly skeptical about the prospects for muni Wi-Fi, I have to say that at the moment it's PFC: pretty freaking cool.(I just watched a YouTube video of some Korean teenage singer I've never heard of, and while the production values leave something to be desired, the download speed was wicked fast -- just about as quick as the T1 connection in my Boulder office.)

It's an interesting time to be looking at the Anaheim network because just last week EarthLink, which has been among the most bullish companies building out citywide Wi-Fi systems, said it would pause in going after new projects and focus on the ones it has under contract. In other words, it's going to see if this whole thing can make money or not before plunging forward.

For now, there are several dozen nodes deployed across central Anaheim, and it seems to be working fine (though I can't say I see a lot of citizens enjoying the marvel of unfettered Wi-Fi on their lunch hour on this beautiful afternoon in SoCal). Eventually EarthLink will cover about 50 square miles of Anaheim, spending around $5 million on the network. The EarthLink guys giving the tour today were fairly candid about seeing Anaheim and the couple of other big networks now under construction, Philadelphia and New Orleans, as proving grounds for the technology and for the business model. Whether EarthLink can sign up enough subscribers to make these networks profitable remains to be seen; but if it can make it work here, it will move on to other large metro markets.

Now I'm watching clips of the Golden State Warriors' latest upset of the hapless, overrated Dallas Mavericks in the NBA playoffs. As it happens I'm just about a block away from the practice facility of the Anaheim Ducks, who face the Vancouver Canucks tonight in game 4 of their NHL playoff series. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and Anaheim's spanking new wireless network is PFC.