In late 2004, the idea of city-wide Wi-Fi networks was electric. These metro-scale Wi-Fi networks would cross the chasm of the digital divide by bringing affordable broadband to low-income parts of major cities, and broadband of any kind to marginal neighborhoods, small towns, and largely rural counties. In mid-2008, the juice has drained out; yesterday, the last of the three major independent city-wide Wi-Fi network builders, MetroFi, said they're pulling the plug. EarthLink, another of the large providers, had already given notice of their exit in August 2007, and filed suit this week to remove the equipment for their flagship Philadelphia network. (Kite, a provider mostly in the Southwest, abandoned their Wi-Fi networks starting in early 2008.)

MetroFi predates the muni-Fi movement, having being founded in the early part of the century when broadband penetration via cable and DSL was still modest in many parts of the U.S., prices were high, and current and future speeds were low and expected low. Wi-Fi could compete admirably against these wired networks, it was thought, and against the weak first wave of third-generation (3G) cellular, on price, speed, and availability.

The incumbents don't stand still, and Wi-Fi, designed for interiors, didn't scale well. While it turns out to be possible to build a large-scale seamless Wi-Fi network that delivers from 1 to 4 Mbps of service outdoors to a laptop, and indoors through a $100 to $200 signal booster, it also proved true that a provider needed two to three times the number of Wi-Fi nodes across a city to achieve those speeds than was estimated when networks were largely bid out in 2005 and 2006. If you budgeted for 20 to 25 nodes per square mile and need nearly 50 of these multi-thousand-dollar transceivers, it's hard to imagine how that affects the bottom line. USI Wireless, which biult Minneapolis's network, appears to be the only firm that got the numbers and engineering to add up for them so far.

Artwork: Chip Taylor

I've written about two separate trends that have just collided today: in-flight broadband and fixed-rate unlimited monthly Wi-Fi roaming. Perhaps collided is the wrong word when referring to airplanes, though.

iPass, an aggregated remote access and end-point security provider, announced today that it will offer roaming with Aircell Gogo, likely to be the first in-flight broadband service launched in the U.S. At least two competitors are at work, but Aircell will likely be first with launches on American Airlines and Virgin America later this year, and maybe in a matter of weeks.

As I wrote recently, iPass provides service to corporations that can distribute their costs for metered service by the minute, hour, day, or month from all their employees across iPass's system that includes dial-up, Ethernet, 3G, and Wi-Fi worldwide. The company recently added individual packages that have fixed rates for U.S. or international usage. The cheapest plan is $29.95 per month for unlimited U.S. Wi-Fi, dial-up, and Ethernet (typically in hotel rooms) and $44.95 for the worldwide version.

iPass couldn't be pinned down today about pricing for the Gogo service, but expects to charge additional fees for Gogo access; a spokesperson said that prices haven't yet been set. Gogo plans to charge a retail price of $9.95 for flights of three hours or shorter, and $12.95 for all longer flights. (Correction: This article originally stated that iPass wasn't currently planning to charge extra for Gogo service, but that is incorrect. A spokesperson clarified earlier remarks to explain that additional fees will be likely, but that those haven't been determined yet.)

That's not out of line with the day rate at hotels and airports, where the walk-up rate can be from $7 to $15, but hotspot aggregators like Boingo (which owns many airport Wi-Fi operations) and iPass pay the provider a wholesale rate that can be as low as 50 cents per session. Wholesale providers and aggregators typically don't release these wholesale rate numbers.

Mint.com, a free financial management site I've come to love, is offering users the chance to hop into an upcoming private beta of its service expansion to cover investment accounts such as 401(k)s. 

Mint currently makes it easy to see where your money goes by displaying transactions and balances for online savings, checking and credit card accounts. You provide the username and password for each account, and the site automatically pulls in each day's transactions.

For those of you who really, really love your cutting-edge Flash content, Adobe made a prerelease test version of the Flash 10 Player available today. You can download an installer for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux from the Adobe Labs Web site.

Because this is a testing version, you're not likely to see any content that requires the new player in the wild just yet. But if you design or maintain Web pages yourself, it might be a good idea to give them a whirl with the beta player, just to make sure that all your old content still renders the way it should with the new version.

According to a press release issued by Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit Tuesday, Office 2008, which debuted at this year's MacWorld Expo in January, was the biggest release of the productivity suite for the Mac platform ever. It's selling three times faster than the previous version, say Microsoft sales reps.

It wasn't all cheers for the latest version of Mac Office, however. Business users, in particular, were dismayed that Microsoft removed support for VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) from the product, which meant that it couldn't run custom scripts developed for previous versions, or for Windows Office. But in a rare about-face, it seems that VBA may be returning to a future version of Mac Office -- though a precise timeline remains elusive.

If you're like me and your Web browser has become an essential work tool, take a look at a Lifehacker post put up today about bookmarks.  Along with the tips on using Firefox keywords and bringing Gmail into the mix mentioned in the post itself, readers weigh in with a wealth of comments on their own preferred solutions.

Many of those comments mention Foxmarks, my own preferred tool for Firefox bookmarks.  The free add-on allows for quick and easy bookmarks sync between browsers on different PCs - on work and home computers, for example.  It also means I never have to back up my bookmarks, as I get my whole list in any new browser as soon as I install the add-on.

I'm a confirmed Ubuntu fan, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the release of Fedora 9 this morning. Fedora is the community-maintained Linux distribution that's the foundation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the leading commercial version of the open source OS. No surprise, then, that it has a tremendous following.

You can think of Fedora as a testing-ground for RHEL; it's where you can find the latest cutting-edge features before they make their way out to the officially-supported distribution. That means it's really best suited for hobbyists, but it's also a good way to get the jump on the best that Linux has to offer.

Small businesses are treated like the last child picked for a baseball team in the broadband world. Too small to afford connections faster than DSL, which might be inadequate for their needs, and too large to find plans acceptable that, while affordable, don't provide them necessities like static, public IP addresses and business-level support. They're standing there with their ball and glove, waiting to play.

The AT&T U-Verse for Business service should therefore be of great interest to firms that want the fastest service with the least fuss. Cable providers have been offering business cable for some time, typically at just a slightly higher cost than residential service, but AT&T is pairing free hotspot office with very high-speed download rates, which could hit their offer out of the park.

The company is offering tiers from 1.5 Mbps downstream and 1.0 Mbps upstream for $40 per month up to 10 Mbps/1.5 Mbps for $100 per month. This includes providing a single Wi-Fi gateway for the office, and unlimited use on the AT&T Wi-Fi Basic network, which is Starbucks, McDonald's, Barnes & Noble, and airports that AT&T operates, but excludes hotels and roaming airports.

The service, initially offered in 40 markets served by AT&T, is enormously cheaper than what a T-1 line typically costs in the same place: usually hundreds of dollars per month for 1.5 Mbps/1.5 Mbps. T-1 lines can come with extremely high-level service level agreements, like 99.999 percent uptime, something that's not mentioned in today's announcement for U-Verse for Business.

That's part and parcel of this offering, though, which is focused on business users, not business servers. There's no mention on monthly data transfer limits, whether servers are allowed, or other similar issues. But for offices that need more oomphf and less expense, this should lower your bills, either through a switch to AT&T's service, or through increased competition from currently higher priced offerings.

If you've ever asked a friend or coworker to call you at a particular time to help you escape an interminable meeting or end a bad date, you're in luck. 

Enter your own phone number at a simple new site, phonemyphone.com, and choose a date and time. The site will then ring you (for free) at the time you specify. You could also have it call you immediately, which could be useful if you want to find your cell phone and don't have another phone handy, as killerstartups.com points out.

Hate paying for Wi-Fi but want a reliable, decent connection that your corner coffeeshop might not be able to offer? (Mine can, but that's not uniformly the case.) Two developments this week may keep your pocketbook full. AT&T slipped out and Cablevision announced significant additions in Wi-Fi access for their current customers.

AT&T is taking over the Wi-Fi service from T-Mobile for Starbucks corporate-owned, standalone stores--over 7,000 in the U.S.--and slipped their kimono last week by accidentally (perhaps) making an iPhone-tailored gateway page available at Starbucks that prompted subscribers for their cell number. Enter it, and you were in, gratis.

That portal disappeared after a few days, but AT&T revised its iPhone plan features sometime in the last day or two to include access to all 17,000 of its domestic hotspots at no additional cost to iPhone subscribers. (That's 17,000 once the Starbucks transition is done, but T-Mobile and AT&T are engaged in a very goodsportsman-like handover in which subscribers to both networks will have access throughout; T-Mobile HotSpot subscribers will continue to have service for at least five years at Starbucks locations, too.)

AT&T already offers free Wi-Fi on its domestic network (excluding hotels and some airports, but including McDonald's, Barnes and Noble, and Starbucks) to its 1.5 Mbps and faster DSL customers, all fiber subscribers, and remote business access users--12 million in all!

(Just as I was about to post this, Computerworld's Gregg Keizer posted this story that AT&T had scrubbed that information from their site. Up, down, up, down, let's not call the whole thing off. It'll be back--but maybe not until the June 9 Apple developer's conference kickoff at which the iPhone 2.0 software, production software developer's kit, and 3G iPhone are all expected to ship or be released.)

Cablevision meanwhile dropped a bombshell today when they announced that they'd be building a $350 million--yes, million--Wi-Fi network across a big hunk of their coverage territory in New York, especially focused on Long Island. This service will be built over two years and be free to its millions of cable broadband subscribers, who already get among the highest speeds of any cable system in the US: 15/2 Mbps (downstream/upstream) and 30/5 Mbps flavors are their two listed offerings. Non-subscribers will pay to use the network, which they claim will have 1.5 Mbps of downstream Wi-Fi service.

Cablevision is building this network clearly to remain in play with a "quadruple" play: that is, voice, fixed broadband, video, and mobile broadband. Sprint and Clearwire's deal with Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner, and other cable operators has both a direct and indirect impact on Cablevision, which while not in competition with other cable providers, must fight back other video, data, mobile, and voice firms.

All I know is that additional services at no additional cost means a win for the consumer, and I'm happy to see it continue to expand.