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Gordon Bruce, the director of the City & County of Honolulu’s Department of Information Technology, announced yesterday that the Earthlink WiFi project in Chinatown will start service in June.

EarthLink is providing the service, which will be free for the first year. After that, the C&C will have to find a company to pick up the tab, possibly through paid subscriptions. The main competitors for subscription wireless in downtown Honolulu are WiMax (Clearwire), and mobile carriers that offer cellular data cards and limited WiFi access (Sprint, T-Mobile and Cingular).

EarthLink operates municipal WiFi networks in 8 other states and cities like New Orleans, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Anaheim. It’s been a a steep learning curve, and EarthLink has decided to limit its bidding process for future sites, to concentrate on current markets. An AP story from May 21 questioned the entire business model, based on problems that another vendor has encountered in a publicly-owned project in Lompoc, CA. I agree with the PF HYPER Blog that these problems don’t seem likely in an outsourced project such as EarthLink’s.

The coverage are includes the core of HPU’s downtown campus. The university has operated its own WiFi network for several years. I’m eager to see how far the EarthLink signal penetrates into our classroom and office buildings, and how much interference HPU and other businesses encounter from the EarthLink service.

“Once up and completely running, the network will provide Internet access across a 27-block area ranging from North Beretania Street to North Nimitz Highway, and from Fort Street Mall to the Nu’uanu Stream.” Here’s a map of the coverage area, courtesy of the Honolulu Advertiser.

The system includes 19 antennas mounted on traffic lights and light poles to create a mesh network capable of delivering 1 Mbps of bandwidth throughout the coverage area.