Earthlink Support Number 🎯+1‒8O5━399=792O🎯 Customer Number This has been a bad week for municipal Wi-Fi and a very bad week for EarthLink.

The ISP cut 900 jobs and closed several regional offices. This followed what Internet News called a "dismal" second quarter. The piece says that the company is expected to continue to "bleed well into 2008" as it struggles to survive.

News reports this week detailed three hits EarthLink took to its municipal wireless business. If this in essence is the company's exit from the business, it is a painful one.

A project in Chicago was tabled after the city was unable to work out a deal with EarthLink and AT&T. The Motley Fool says the city, AT&T and EarthLink couldn't agree on the financial structure. Wired, quoting The Chicago Tribune, offered a bit more detail: The city initially only wanted to provide infrastructure. AT&T and EarthLink asked that the city become an "anchor tenant" and pay to use the network for city services. Negotiations along those lines fizzled.

EarthLink also this week dropped out of an agreement to participate in a municipal Wi-Fi project in San Francisco. CNET says that the project was approved in January, though it was awaiting final sign-off from the city's Board of Supervisors. The deal was structured differently than the Chicago plan. Google was to sell advertising on the free portion of the service. EarthLink, CNET says, wanted to ante up $2 million to join the project and be allowed to sell higher-speed subscriptions for $20 apiece.

EarthLink also is in trouble in Houston, according to the Houston Business Journal. There, it agreed to pay a $5 million penalty for missing an agreement deadline with the city. A restructured agreement gives EarthLink nine months to decide if and how it wants to participate in the two-year-old project. The initiative now is on hold, the story says.

A blog posting August 30 by Dave Coustan, who only is identified as an EarthLink employee, says that the company will continue operating existing municipal wireless networks, including one in Philadelphia. It's interesting that the blogger - who writes as if he has a good take on management thinking - says that the company is discussing anchor residency options with municipal officials in San Francisco and elsewhere, while the news reports suggest that the deal is dead. That point, the blogger said, was addressed by CEO Rolla Huff in a conference call about the restructuring held on August 29.

How many of you are still using Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL or EarthLink to send email on behalf of your business? How many of you are actually paying both AOL and EarthLink every month to send email to your prospects and current customers? Did you know that every time you send an email using these services you are literally allowing them to take money away from your business? Please don't get me wrong, I too have used and still use some of these services but I never use them for my business. I use my business email address (jeffb@2thenextlevel.com) for communication, correspondence and marketing. The minute I hit "send," not only do I get to put my company name in someone's email box but I also give them a way to get back to my website for additional information on my company--and the possibility of a sale.

Your email address has become a major form of both marketing and branding. So much so that when you send it out to multiple people in the form of an offer you have for your goods or services your company name could be read by millions. So, why would you allow Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL or EarthLink to get all the credit. These email services already have millions upon millions of customers. Yet you have been letting them take precious marketing and branding dollars right out of your pocket. Every time you send that email you're giving

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