Tomorrow the World...
...or at least Philadelphia. As we reported in our most recent Better All The Time, Google is planning to make the city of San Francisco one big hotspot. Carlo at TechDirt reports that Earthlink is planning the same thing for Philadelphia, with the added notion of trying to make some money off the deal:
As expected, EarthLink will be a carrier's carrier and sell access wholesale to other providers, as well as selling to end users itself. Like we noted before, Philadelphia's approach looks to be the right one: little financial risk to the city and its taxpayers, a common network that's available for wholesale, and cheap connectivity for consumers.
Hmmm...I don't know, that Google model sounded pretty good. Free wi-fi for everybody! But maybe that's just a little too good to be true? Google may end up following the NetZero model on this deal, where "free" ends up meaning something other than, well, you know, free.