Wired:Last week, San Francisco lost a free net, but it may have gained a mesh. The story is San Franciscan in parts, but has lessons for cities across the world - especially those dabbling with rolling out their own free for everyone wireless internet (Wi-Fi), writes  Danny O'Brien.

San Francisco's long- promised, but never arriving, free net was the one due to be provided by Google, with support from EarthLink, one of the last internet service providers (ISPs) in the US that is independent from the telephone companies.

Last week, EarthLink bailed. Stung by losses - the company simultaneously announced a lay- off of 900 employees and a closure of offices in four cities - EarthLink announced it could not "hold up its end of the bargain", building and operating a free city-wide Wi-Fi network that Google would subsidise with advertising.

I imagine there may have been some sighs of relief at Google and the city as EarthLink bowed out of the deal.

The Google-proposed idea, supported by San Francisco's telegenic mayor Gavin Newsom, had become swiftly bogged down by the town's uniquely activist and grassroot politics.

Not a vast city, San Francisco nevertheless has a finely balanced power structure (Newsom shares power with a board of democratically elected supervisors), within which the "free internet for the people" cry quickly became drowned by needless politicking, as well as genuine concerns from the population.

Who would get this free internet, some asked? Free Wi-Fi still requires that users have their own computers supplied with Wi-Fi cards. In a city with its fair share of poverty and a sometimes struggling migrant population, that would cut out many.

What would Google and EarthLink get in return for this free deal? EarthLink would get a monopoly on wireless internet in the city for the foreseeable future. As for Google - initially the secretive company made few statements about its business plans, but the idea of tracking individual users across a government-sponsored network worried many privacy advocates (including my day employer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation) in this politically sensitive city.

Then there was the question of what happens after the Wi-Fi network was rolled out. The Wi-Fi standard had already gone through three upgrades in the last decade, all of which would have required an expensive hardware upgrade through the city.

Better to spend real money, said some supervisors, on a genuinely future-proof system: fibre to San Francisco's homes, owned and managed by the city. That would give bandwidth in the gigabytes, rather than the paltry DSL-speeds promised by Google.

All this, before even considering concerns about the practicality of the project: could Google really blanket a city known for its hills and fog in usable Wi-Fi?

There were even some sincere citizens who spoke in the public hearings of the dangers of so much wireless energy passing through their unprotected heads.

All of these hypotheticals will remain that way permanently for San Francisco.

But perhaps, with the omission of the misled, radiowave-fearing minority, other cities considering the same option might take heed.

Municipal Wi-Fi has not been as great a success as many hoped - Chicago announced it would abandon its plans this month and the jury is still out in other US urban areas.

Google's home town of Mountain View seems to enjoy its free Wi-Fi (with traffic increases of 10 per cent a month), but in the larger metropolises, it might be just too much for even a company as big and as well-funded as Google to bite off.

Or at least if it does, it does so by directly approaching the city itself. In the last few months, another sneakier attempt has been made to drench the city in free Wi-Fi. A start-up hardware company, Meraki, has been posting up small and cheaply printed notices across the neighbourhoods of San Francisco.

"Free the net" they say, with tear-off phone numbers and URLs. The company has been delivering free Wi-Fi routers to anyone in the central parts of the city who asks.

If you already have an internet connection, you can plug in Meraki's dinky router, stick it in your window and share a carefully limited portion of your bandwidth with anyone in range. If you don't already have a net connection, your Meraki router will seek out the signal of others and form a mesh: like a bucket-chain at a waterpump, each router will carry data for the rest and reach where there is no net.

Have enough Meraki routers in a neighbourhood and you have coverage and bandwidth that would make EarthLink envious. And all without bothering city hall for a single public meeting.

It's still early to say whether Meraki can gain critical mass and form a real mesh before it runs out of money - each freely handed-out router cost $49 (€36) retail; mine has yet to find another to connect to, even in the densest Meraki coverage area.

If Meraki succeeds, San Francisco may well get its Wi-Fi net, warts and all. One of Meraki's key investors is Google, and the company reserves the right to pick a business model involving the reselling of personal data to outside parties.

This is exactly the privacy threats that critics levelled at the Google service. I dread to think what the radiowave haters will make of it.