"Tenant anchor"? What the hell does that mean? That is a phrase that sounds awfully Orwellian. Perhaps it is a euphemism for "feudalist state", but how the hell could I know based on the vague information provided.

By the way, Tim, you should follow up on what this means for San Franciscans as to what will happen next. Does this make a municipal broadband network more likely now?

By the way: Let the Newsom junta riot. It's not like it will get him anywhere.

Actually, I think in this case Google's the anchor tenant of the Earthlink network.

Like in a mall, an anchor tenant is one that commits to a substantial payment/rent for the long term. Google's commitment to pay for free access would seem to meet that.

@sascha - EarthLink Press Release did not say anything for or against SF deal.

I suspect EarthLink has gone to moneybags Google and asked for more money than what they have previously agreed to pay for the free tier or EarthLink will pull out of the deal as it stands - probably also pay for increasing the free speed and other tweaks the Supervisors are asking for.

Google is probably saying they don't want to make any more changes to the Free privacy policy.

btw Ron Vinson is not head of DTIS - just a manager or assistant Departmet Head there.

See:
"Google funded startup brings free Wi-Fi to the streets of San Francisco"

http://www.theregister.com/2007/07/28/meraki_free_the_net/

(Google may be using this as a bargaining chip with Earthlink (which is probably now asking for more Anchor Tenant money for the SF deal to stay afloat) Google can do this because it is a Meraki.net investor. The San Francisco Meraiki test has recently had higher visibility in the Press.

I think many not bothered by Wi-Fi health concerns, prefer the Meraki Wi-Fi solution to the EarthLink franchise which requires no city approvals:

It's faster than the 300k free tier, it can roll out immediately, it's designed to work indoors in multi-residential situations and it may have fewer privacy concerns since it currently does not require a login.)

-kimo

Google is the anchor tenant of Earthlink but the Mayor's contract is with Earthlink and not with Google. That is very clear. Google is preserving its reputation for direct contracting after everyone else has fallen on their swords.

Also, there is no correlation or direct comparison with how malls work with anchor tenants here. Governmental structures work differently.

What Earthlink's CEO Rolla Huff is referring to is it needs cities to become the anchor tenants to insure the security of the commitment. This is akin to how we have these (ridiculous) agreements with PG$E, AT$T and Comca$t. We are their anchor tenants thus the nature of franchises.

It is clear that Earthlink will never become a franchise and this whole deal was a way to get a long term contract instead of going the franchise route. But, we all know that was quite transparent and, obviously now, is backfiring.

So, what is the damage control for Earthlink Muni-WiFi division? Try to get as close to a franchise as possible without really applying for one.

We must remember how humungo publicly-traded corporations work. They have shareholders and the CEO must answer to a board of directors. Staff who dream up these things answer to the CEO, and so on. This standard hierarchical corp structure operates in and of itself and doesn't really adjust for when dealing with public entities like city governments.

So, let's recap Earthlink's recent history. The previous CEO Garry Betty starts the Muni-WiFi projects. Four cities are contracted with and somewhere reported they only had about 2,000 paying subscribers. There isn't a free tier in any of those installations. All subscribers are paying customers. Not very good return on investment (ROI).

Mr. Betty passes away in January 2007. Four months go by. Earthlink loses $30,000,000 in first quarter earnings. In second quarter, they continue this losing trend. (NOTE: Mr. Barry also introduced a partnership with SK Telecom to bring Helio to the fore which also is a lost investment.)

Enter Rolla P. Huff as the new CEO. If you know about this layer of corporate culture, this is about the time you call in a troubleshooter. Mr. Huff is very good at this.

Now, one can only surmise that CEO Huff after just starting his new gig announces that Muni-WiFi will be very closely watched and will cut funding on muncipal WiFi projects.

Now, there are those high level executives and managers that are still carrying Muni-WiFi on the loyalty of Mr. Betty and their jobs and reputations depend on any success Muni-WiFi can muster including market share; retail and on the stock exchange.

This is about them getting the project approved and not necessarily CEO Huff doing it for them. These folks have to prove themselves or CEO Huff will "cut the cord" as Donna Jaegers, a telecoms analyst with Denver-based Janco Partners put it plainly.

So, really looking at the macro scope of the story, this sounds more like a bail-out than anything else. It's a Hail-Mary play in order save this project, or shall we say, experiment, Earthlink thought about trying.

Why would we go into contract under these conditions especially when the CEO announces publicly upon taking his position that he is seeking to cut the project? Why would we go into business with a company that is slowly losing itself and not being innovative as others are? Why would we not consider other known companies whose sole and primary function is in the deployment of Muni-WiFi?

Know this, Earthlink is not in this business. It is a johhnie-come-lately to Muni-WiFi. It is purely in the business of reselling existing services, better known as the 'middleman' as it has built its entire business on reselling DSL and just providing user services and customer support, of which, there are excess in complaints about even from our own Supervisors.

It is really time to let this one go and to allow the Supervisors to continue on its very standard way of developing citywide infrastructure projects; carefully, tempered, accountable. We can't continue with all these trendy ideas that don't really work, ie, Care Not Cash, myriad Project (whatever)Connect, etc.

Those of us in the tech community and industry know the facts and realities of technology. Those of us in the tech advocacy field rely on those same tekkies to get it right and real. It's the big corporate marketeers that are trying to sell glitz, shimmer and sizzle that tends to create less-than trends that the have-not's get mesmerized by.

We who are privileged enough to know the realities are responsible to make sure that the general public doesn't get sold short. Let's not leave them further in the digital dust.

This is the true nature of social democracy.

Bruce Wolfe
PublicNet SF Coalition
SF People's Organization Representative

Well the Supes are only asking for things like privacy, 1MB/s free, 95% outdoor and 90% indoor coverage, 8 year franchise which were in the original RFP and which other bidders agree to provide. Somewhere in the Earthlink/Google negotiations these things dropped off the map.

This btw is the first time the BOS has has an opportunity to weigh in on this contract because DTIS and the Mayor's office have consistently lied to them and ignored their input for over a year.