Remember Earthlink? You know, the company most famous for pissing away a market share second only to AOL in the late 90’s. Earlier this year the city chose them to head up the citywide Wi-Fi project, primarily because they were willing to build the network for free and recoup the costs in subscriptions. Can you guess where this is going?

A proposed citywide wireless Internet service is on hold while Earthlink, the city’s chosen provider, rethinks its Wi-Fi business strategy.

Yeah, I was afraid that’s what you’d say. Earthlink… actually, let’s refer to them as Earthtank, tanked once before and are poised to do it again. Earthtank apparently won the contract without really knowing how viable free Wi-Fi networks were as a business plan. I’ll give you a hint guys: free anything is a bad business model. This is the sort of thing that businesses normally decide before competing for large contracts, but hey, when you’re Earthtank you do whatever the fuck you want.

The bummer is that Earthtank beat out Citi WiFi, a company actually based in St. Pete. Buy local, bitches. They had a slightly different thought on how it would work out, nixing the whole “free for the city” aspect (which seems more than reasonable), and also had a bit of sage advice regarding Earthtank:

Citi said its technology would be more cost effective than Earthlink’s and suggested the out-of-town company was overpromising to get the deal.

Overpromising? You mean like telling an entire city you’ll do something and then pressing pause to rethink your business strategy?