SkaroffBlog

The plan to turn Philadelphia into what Mayor Street calls “the first completely wireless city in the country” is moving ahead, but with possible delays.

Back on Oct. 3, Dianah Neff, the city’s Chief Information Officer, announced an agreement with Earthlink under which the ISP would finance and build a city-wide Wi-Fi broadband network for Wireless Philadelphia (WP), a non-profit set up specifically for this project. Neff, who also heads the WP Executive Committee, said that final contract negotiations would take 60 days, to be followed by City Council’s approval process and a January construction kickoff. The project would be complete by the end of 2006.

That 60-day period has just ended, but negotiations are still in progress, according to today’s Daily Pennsylvanian. Neff now expects final agreement with Earthlink later this month after Council has begun its long holiday break. The optimistic timetable now calls for Council to to start a one-month-minimum approval procedure Jan. 24, and finalize the contract in time for a rescheduled March construction launch. The completion date is still slated for the end of 2006, Neff says.

Construction consists of installing several thousand shoebox-size antennas mostly on city-owned telephone poles. Technically, new areas can go hot as soon as their antennas are installed, meaning that a gradual rollout is possible as construction progresses.

Neff often refers to the WP plan as Mayor Street’s project. She credits her boss, a long-time Blackberry user, as the visionary behind WP.

Earthlink, until now primarily a dial-up ISP, is moving into a new business area. They will finance, build, and manage WP as well as sell wholesale services to the various ISPs to which end-users ultimately subscribe. To “bridge the digital divide,” –a phrase often used by WP– discounted access rates of about $10 per month will be offered to qualifying residents. In its work with comunity groups and schools, WP plans to use some revenue to provide low-cost computers and train users.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2005 at 2:32 pm and is tagged as Penn, Philly, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.