All Things Digital

American Airlines (AMR) rolled out its take on cloud computing today, becoming the first airline in the U.S. to offer full in-flight broadband access. Dubbed “GoGo” and provided by AirCell, the service is available for a flat $12.95 fee on flights between New York and San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, and New York and Miami. Speeds are said to be roughly equivalent to those offered by a slow DSL connection. When Walt tested the service earlier this summer, he found the typical download speed to hover between 500 and 600Kbps. Upload speeds were between 250 and 300Kbps. Not bad. Certainly, good enough to make it compelling for some travelers. “It’s a game-changer,” said Henry Harteveldt, an analyst with Forrester Research. “You’re no longer forced to be isolated from what’s going on in your office, with your clients or with friends or family. For business travelers, this will greatly aid productivity, and for leisure travelers, it means they will be in control of their entertainment.”

According to popular legend, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once kept two versions of his business card in his wallet–one with the title CEO, the other with “I’M CEO . . . BITCH.” Seems that before Facebook became the de facto platform of the attention economy, it was a platform for the attention-starved.

Well, there was no shortage of attention for the social-networking phenom Wednesday as it kicked off its second F8 conference in San Francisco. In a 90-minute keynote address, Zuckerberg–a spitting image of Judge Reinhold in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”–offered up new details on Facebook’s new Great Apps program, the expansion of its Translation effort, and Facebook Connect, a service that will essentially transform a user’s Facebook profile into a portable Internet identity that can be extended to other Web sites. Also discussed: the company’s new mission statement and the first fruits of the fbFund, the $10 million reserve established last year to help finance new Facebook applications.

This agreement catapults San Francisco into a leadership position in wireless technology: the network ensures universal, affordable wireless broadband access for all San Franciscans, especially low-income and disadvantaged residents; and through the mayor’s digital divide program, children and students will have the digital tools to ensure that they have access to everything that the Internet has to offer the growing minds of the city’s promising future.”

–- Donald Berryman, executive vice president of EarthLink, Jan. 5, 2007

Establishing a citywide wireless network in San Francisco may well prove too daunting a job for even Google. The company’s partnership with EarthLink to provide free wireless Internet access in the city may be in danger of collapse, now that the ISP has announced it will re-examine its municipal-wireless network plans..

During EarthLink’s second-quarter conference call last week, newly appointed President and CEO Rolla Huff said the company’s approach to the muni Wi-Fi market isn’t viable. “The Wi-Fi business as currently constituted will not provide an acceptable return,” Huff said. “We’re actively exploring ways to scale this business more economically. We’re going to look for municipal government to step up and become a meaningful anchor tenant on completion of a build. That would go a long way in our being able to get an acceptable return on this investment. Until we’re convinced that we can build new networks and get an acceptable return, we will delay any further new build-outs.”

If that is Huff’s position, he’s not going to take kindly the city’s proposed adjustments to its contract with EarthLink, which includes increasing the speed of the service and shortening the length of the term for which the company would provide it to eight years from 16–neither of which will do much to increase its ROI.

It seems likely, then, that EarthLink’s involvement in San Francisco’s municipal wireless efforts is finally drawing to a close–nearly three years after it was first announced. “The existing contract with EarthLink was already unlikely to move forward due to EarthLink’s business-model changes,” Glenn Fleishman explains at Wi-Fi Networking News. “The emendations to the contract requested by the supervisors’ head ensure that EarthLink will ultimately back out. I give it another four to six weeks before the whole deal is over. Which means that SF has to return to the drawing board.”

What this means for the other 215 cities and counties considering municipal Wi-Fi deployments remains to be seen …