Earthlink Escapes Contract for Free San Francisco Wifi

EarthLink said late Wednesday that it is bail­ing out of a con­tract to build San Francisco’s free Wi-​​Fi service.

Earlier on Wednesday, the city of Houston announced that EarthLink had agreed to pay a $5 mil­lion penalty to the city for not meet­ing its first dead­line for build­ing its wire­less net­work. EarthLink has nine months to start con­struc­tion or fig­ure out a way to get out of the con­tract altogether.

And now, the com­pany has also dis­solved its con­tract with San Francisco, which was approved in January but was await­ing final approval from San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.

From c|net.

At least Meraki’s inde­pen­dent push to pro­vide wire­less access to San Francisco res­i­dents is grow­ing, per­haps because of much greater grass-​​roots, citizen-​​based involvement?

From a legal stand­point (con­tract law), it seems pos­si­ble that Earthlink might just escape the con­tract entirely (maybe, but there might be details I don’t have) because the Board of Supervisors never really accepted their offer (or never gen­er­ated a final offer for Earthlink, depend­ing on the details of the situation).

So I think the San Francisco mayor might pos­si­ble be right to blame the Board of Supervisors, but then again, the Board might be right to say they were right to be leery, given Earthlink’s meltdown:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had stated pub­licly that he felt the cur­rent con­tract was suf­fi­cient, blamed the Board of Supervisors for drag­ging its feet and blow­ing the deal.

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said the mayor was com­pletely wrong in his assign­ment of blame.

“The mayor wanted us to rush into a deal that was half-​​baked,” he said. “And now he’s try­ing to cover his tracks instead of look­ing at the real rea­son this deal fell through which is the fact that EarthLink is hav­ing a com­plete finan­cial meltdown.”