Philly: Cut those wires!

Philadelphia, my home for the past two years, has announced that they will be partnering with Earthlink to establish their municipal wireless infrastructure. The article is here.

Although many (including myself) applaud the move to provide free wireless to the people of Philadelphia, others balk at the move due ot its risks to their own business interests. Most notably Telco's and Cable Providers. (If I get it free, why pay?)

The Telco's are a bit of another story and it will be interesting to see how things develop over the next couple of years in this area. One of the most popular applications on the web is Skype, a Voice Over IP application that allows for computer to computer conversations or computer to phone for a small fee.

Well, once everywhere you go has wireless internet, why not have a VoWLAN solution where everyone has a phone which is connecting to the wireless connectivity and not solely to the Verizon's of the world. I remember seeing things like in the works, primarily on campus's around the US where the grounds were covered with WiFi. Covering a whole city, like Earthlink will be doing in Philly and Google will be doing in SF, will have a huge impact on telephony as well as computing more generally.

It will be interesting to see how it shakes out.