Earthlink Discusses Municipal WiFi Networks (ELNK)

Earthlink (ticker: ELNK) CEO Garry Betty describes his company's contract with Philidelphia to build a WiFi network for the city, and other potential contracts:

Subsequent to the end of the third quarter, EarthLink announced that it had been selected to develop and implement the nation's largest municipal Wi-Fi broadband network. Under the terms of the agreement with the City of Philadelphia, EarthLink will implement a 135 square mile citywide Wi-Fi mesh network which will cover almost 600,000 households. We expect to have the first of the four phases completed in the first quarter of 2006, and should have the entire city built out by the fourth quarter of 2006 at a total cost of around $15 million. Our service will retail for around $20 a month and will provide Internet surfing speeds of approximately 1 megabit per second.

While we're excited about the opportunity in Philly, we're also excited about the opportunity to partner with many other cities across the country for muni Wi-Fi deployments. Currently 20 to 25 cities covering more than 10 million households are exploring similar buildouts. We're encouraged by our opportunities for participating in some of these cities' efforts. We expect Anaheim, California, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Minnesota, to be some of the next cities to announce winners.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)

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