The honeymoon is over. At least for now. The NY Times reports that San Francisco has lost their partner for city wide free Wi-Fi, Earthlink. The plan was for Earthlink to shoulder the cost of building and maintaining the Wi-Fi infrastructure, while Google would sell ads to help subsidize the service. Unfortunately, after cutting a number of jobs earlier in the year, Earthlink no longer felt it possible to continue with the project. Guess it is back to trying to find unsecured networks in your building.
Read the full story here
Chicago just abandoned its efforts to install a citywide network as well....
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Commercially provided free community wifi is not the only game in town.
San Francisco has long had a strong grassroots movement to cover the city with open wifi provided by volunteers.
http://www.archive.org/web/sflan.php
There's also a new version of community wifi being promoted in the Bay Area by a company called Meraki.
http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/130745
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