Now arriving in downtown St. Petersburg: the failtrain. Earthlink has officially tapped out, alerting the city that they can totally suck it.

Earthlink has pulled the plug on its plan to build a citywide Wi-Fi network. The company won the chance to build the network earlier this year, but is backing away from any projects where it has not signed contracts, says the city’s chief technology officer, Muslim Gadiwalla.

Haha, pulled the plug… wireless… get it? I think perhaps the most informative bit is buried in another quote:

Wi-Fi networks around the country are on hold or worse as companies discover the networks are harder and more expensive to deploy than expected, but city governments are unwilling to become the main paying users.

How does that even happen? Aren’t companies supposed to be, like, good at what they do? I mean, we give you money, you provide a service, if you do that relatively well then we keep coming back. How does a company like Earthlink totally screw the pooch this hard? Selecting one city as a testbed with no promises might have been smart, eh fellas? Instead they promised some seriously big-ass cities, and one lil’ one (St. Pete, represent!) that they had that shit under control and now it’s all aboard the failtrain, headed straight for the mofuggin’ pier… although, scratch that, the pier already has like 4 failtrain stations.