Hi there, I attended the Wireless Philadelphia Community Forum hosted here at Temple last night. It was really interesting, and I think that the fresh start the new owners are promising could potentially translate into exciting opportunities for Philadelphia's new media industry as well as non-profit and community organizations. For those of you who are interested, below is my recap.
*The Wireless Philadelphia Network was purchased by a group headed by Derek Pew (former CEO of Wireless Philadelphia), former mayoral candidate Tom Knox, and "a group of local investors," including Mark Rupp, who represented the new owners at last night's forum. The group paid Earthlink an "undisclosed sum" for the entire network, certainly less than the $20 million that Earthlink is said to have invested in it. * The new owners plan to provide free "outdoors" Internet access across the city. They plan to make money by selling high-quality indoor connectivity to local businesses, and through advertising. They plan to improve the service of the existing network. For example, when Earthlink built the network they were concerned with "optimizing" its service, which meant that there would be a really strong signal in the center of Rittenhouse Square, but a really weak signal on the edges of the Square to avoid accidentally providing high-quality free service to the apartment buildings surrounding the square. Unfortunately, this high level of concern with "optimization" meant that the outdoor network was also less reliable. The new owners say that they are less concerned about these few pockets of "freeloading" users. * The new owners say that they are going to build the free network, make it available outdoors, and anyone who wants to use it for anything is welcome to do so. Although the new owners envision outdoor, casual laptop use as the core of the free network traffic, they acknowledge that the service could also be used by WiFi-enabled handheld devices. I spoke to both Mark Rupp and Greg Goldman (the CEO of Wireless Philadelphia) about the potential importance of Philadelphia's local new media industry getting involved with the network as a source of new wireless content products and services. I don't think that either organization has thought about this. PANMA may host an event with the new owners and the Wireless Philadelphia crew to explore some of the possibilities. * There is an undefined partnership between the new owners and the Wireless Philadelphia non-profit organization. The Wireless Philadelphia folk will no doubt be in charge of the digital inclusion and community access. My guess is that this might mean extending free service to community centers and fundraising for donations to provide hardware to low-income groups. It seemed to me that some of the community organizations who attended the forum saw the free network as potentially providing something like community access cable, which raises a lot of interesting possibilities. sj Susan Jacobson, PhD Department of Journalism Temple University [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to the list named "UnivCity." To unsubscribe or for archive information, see <http://www.purple.com/list.html>.
