After two years of poor financial performance and unexpected high costs, EarthLink has decided to terminate its Philadelphia municipal wireless service.

The project, started two years ago, wanted to transform the entire city of Philadelphia in a wireless hotspot, this way providing cheap service to both people and business. The wireless transmitters were located on the city streetlights, and EarthLink had agreed to pay Philadelphia rent for the use of them, as well as to support the full cost of building the network.

Even though the project was considered a revolutionary one and the effort was acclaimed, only less than 6000 people of the 100,000 expected subscribed to the service. The losses the company suffered amounted to about $200,000 a month, since subscriber fees covered only half the costs of operating the network.

City officials have refused EarthLink’s offer of donating the equipment to the municipality and an additional $1 million in cash. The reasons for this are the extremely large costs of using the equipment, costs that the city would have to pay from its own budget. 

The internet provider has made efforts in order to sell the network, but no buyers where interested. Not even companies capable of sustaining a project of these dimensions like Verizon or Comcast have shown any interest in a possible acquisition. Under these conditions the project will be shut down after June 12 and the equipment will be taken down off the lampposts.

EarthLink assured the subscribers that they will be helped to move to another service provider within a month.