Philadelphia to buy municipal WiFi network for city business

The City of Philadelphia will pay $2 million to buy the much-hyped but underperforming municipal WiFi network built by Earthlink and more recently owned by the local Network Acquisition Co. Although free Internet access will still be available to the public in some areas, the city intends to use the network principally for official business, such as expanding its web of surveillance cameras and giving city workers the ability to file reports and access data from the field. The network will require significant additional investment to handle that kind of traffic: $17 million between fiscal 2011 and 2015. But the cost of building that kind of broadband citywide wireless network would be far higher, $30 million or more, and take many more years to construct if the city had to start from scratch, said the city's chief technology officer, Allan Frank.