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EarthLink today announced the termination of its Wi-Fi service in Philadelphia - the company is giving its Wi-Fi customers 30 days to find new service before it shuts the network down on June 12th.

"A few weeks earlier, Atlanta-based Earthlink announced it would shut down a similar network in New Orleans," notes the AP's Deborah Yao. "EarthLink has reached agreements with the cities of Corpus Christi, Texas, and Milpitas, California, which are taking over ownership of their networks. EarthLink also has been running a network in Anaheim, California."

"Unfortunately, our hope that we could transfer our network to a non-profit organization that had planned to offer free Wi-Fi throughout Philadelphia will not be realized," says company CEO Rolla Huff. "Since we have exhausted our efforts to find a new owner of the network, our only responsible alternative now is to remove our network at our cost and assist our Wi-Fi customers with alternative ways to access the Internet."

"The failure in Philadelphia, and EarthLink's exiting the entire muni-Fi business, represents the end of a bad model in which a company agreed to assume all risk and costs associated with building a public access network," writes Wi-Fi Networking News' Glenn Fleishman.

More here from Forbes ... more here from AHN ... more here from BetaNews ... more here from Digital Trends ... and the press release is here.