Earthlink has announced that they will turn off the municipal WiFi in Philadelphia in June. The system never ended up being as popular as Earthlink needed it to be. They wanted 100,000 customers, they have a little more than 5000. Earthlink is also planning on shuttering, shelving or selling all of their other WiFi networks throughout the country, in New Orleans, Texas and California.

With no other companies building city-wide wireless networks on WiFi, looks like the whole muni WiFi thing is dead. But people have been saying it for a while. Who ever thought that a technology like WiFi designed for homes and offices would be good choice to cover an entire city?

Meanwhile, Sprint recently inked a deal with wireless broadband company Clearwire to build a high-speed wireless network on a new technology WiMax throughout the U.S.

Is the way to offset the cost of building wireless networks to provide Internet access through advertising? Los Angles-based FreeFi Networks has deployed a campus wide wireless network at Roxbury Community College in Boston. The company has partnered with Microsoft, a company called Front Porch which produces adware, and another company called Experience which provides a web-based recruiting platform.

This plan brings to mind NetZero from way back. Remember the boom days of the Internet when everything was free with an advertisement? That didn’t last with the collapse of the bubble. I haven’t seen the advertisements, but for a college, I would hope that they could provide Internet access to at least students and faculty without having to suffer through them. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.