The New York Times agrees with me: The Times unsigned editorial says that the FCC’s failure to adopt a resale requirement for the 700 MHz nationwide unencumbered commercial licenses (22 MHz of prime territory) wasa big failure: “American consumers have once again been denied a truly open and competitive cellular market.”

SF Bay Guardian editorial says buh-bye to EarthLink: The local weekly writes in an unsigned editorial that there’s no likelihood of EarthLink agreeing to SF’s terms, and no chance that SF would “[fork] over millions of dollars a year to guarantee EarthLink some baseline revenue.” The Guardian says good riddance, which has been their attitude all along, as they’d prefer a comprehensive fiber-optic plan.

White space device fails FCC trial: Google, Microsoft, and other firms submitted a device to the FCC for testing that would allow low-level signal use of “white space,” or unused broadcast spectrum which varies depending on the TV market. Unfortunately, the FCC found that the prototypes didn’t detect TV signals accurately enough to prevent transmissions when broadcasts were present. The FCC didn’t close the door, noting that the prototypes were “initial efforts,” according to IDG News Service.

Clearwire increases customers, revenues, losses: The wireless firm has 299,000 customers, up 41,000 in the last quarter; $35.5m in revenue, a jump of 32.4 percent year over year; and a loss of $118m. Their head notes that in established markets, 14 of 25 areas served are cash-flow positive. They also have over 10 percent of households subscribed in those markets. Clearwire said it will start testing 2 Mbps down with 4 Mbps burst for $45 per month for residential users; and will test a PC Card with a $60 per month subscription.

The Bush Administration declined to use its veto to overturn a trade ruling that will prohibit the import of cell phones and devices that use Qualcomm third-generation (3G) chipsets: The ruling, in which Broadcom’s claims of patent violation were found to have merit, prohibits the importation of any model of device that wasn’t already being imported before June 7.

Verizon sidestepped the matter by agreeing on a fee schedule with Broadcom, that included Verizon withdrawing its support for Qualcomm’s lobbying and legal efforts. Verizon will pay Broadcom $6 per phone with the infringing chips, up to $40m per quarter and up to $200m overall. A drop in the bucket if they have advanced phones that their competitors don’t, such as the new Blackberry with Wi-Fi that AT&T planned to introduce this month. I do not know if that Blackberry model would be covered under the ban, but it’s possible. (GSM 3G chips have a number of suppliers, as opposed to Qualcomm’s control of CDMA, a standard they invented.)

Qualcomm has another tool, however; it immediately announced that it would ask a federal court for an injunction now that the US Trade Representative, to whom Pres. Bush had delegated this particular veto power, has opted against intervening. A previous attempt at an injunction was turned down by the Federal District Court on the grounds that it lacked jurisdiction until that decision had been made.

Minneapolis’s Wi-Fi provider made three great choices in the wake of the bridge disaster, Julio Ojeda-Zapata writes in the (St. Paul) Pioneer Press: The made it free, expanded it, and added full zoom/pan/tilt Web cameras.

Meraki gets a long, positive write-up in Scientific American: The magazine does a great job of hitting the high spots about why Meraki’s idea of cheap, mesh routers that self-organize and can take multiple injection points without configuration have had such positive early impact. Most of their competitors are selling devices for 40 to 100 times as much as their $50 box, but those more expensive devices are designed to be more rugged, often work with public safety networks, feature radios with 10 to 35 times the raw signal power, and so forth. (Radios grow more expensive on a steeply climbing curve as you increase power output.) Meraki’s raw cost? About $5 in components (chips and the radio); the rest is circuit boards, assembly, cases, and overhead.

The Mercury News notes that the Wireless Silicon Valley plan now has an anchor tenancy requirement of sorts: Another shoe drops. The Wireless Silicon Valley project was supposed to offer free access at a reasonable speed to all residents covered by the network, ultimately, and it was to be funded by the consortium building it, which includes Cisco and IBM. The free requirement is still in place, and the network builders are still putting out the initial sums. However, the reporter notes that there’s been a rather significant shift: the cities covered “will be asked to pay to use the network, enabling police officers, firefighters and even housing inspectors to file reports on the go.” That’s no secret: It was clear from the beginning that there was the intent for cities to sign up. But it’s clearly moved from the consortium encouraging cities to commit to contracts at some point to requiring cities to commit before the network is built. Which, by the way, is vastly behind schedule, and no model contract has yet been publicly seen.

I wrote the first of these stories two years ago about cafes turning off Wi-Fi or changing their model after being deluged with barely- or non-paying laptop table campers: The latest installment looks at a few places in New York, where store owners are a little more than frustrated. Waltz-Astoria is charging $2 per hour for Wi-Fi or electricity, offering it free to regulars who sign up for their email newsletter. The Roebling Tea Room and another shop, Aroma, have covered their electrical outlets. Aroma shuts down Wi-Fi during lunch.

These campers spend from $0 to $3, stay as long as eight hours, and occupy tables for four with their lonesome, and use a few pennies or more of electricity, to boot! Now, they’re a subset of all cafe laptop users. Myself, I’m often in some venue for an hour or two, spending $3 to $5, and taking the smallest possible footprint. It only takes a few bad apples, though.

My early story—tipped by a colleague who spotted the trend—covered Victrola here in Seattle. My editor back then asked, Is this a trend? Or is it just a few places? I said that I was pretty sure it was not a trend, but it was an interesting development that was likely to spread slightly as cafes, looking for an option, heard about the idea. Once you install Wi-Fi, it’s weird to turn it off or change the terms of access; with a peer group of other owners, even those you don’t know, it may be easier to modify what you’re offering. [Link via Craig Plunkett]

Ricochet has gone through more lives than a cat stuck in a rotary press (I’m no Dan Rather): The first city-wide wireless networking system has changed hands yet again, the fourth time in six years, and shut down its San Diego operations in favor of focusing in Denver, where it has 6,000 subscribers. Ricochet’s latest move announced today is that the company’s parent has sold it to Civitas Wireless, a company founded by Ricochet Wireless’s president (since 2005), Judi Evans. She is the president, CEO, and majority owner of the new firm, the press release notes. Ricochet scored a deal with Denver in April that allow it to use its existing right of way to deploy Wi-Fi, WiMax, and other wireless technology. While Ricochet spins this as a deal with the city and county, the government never made such an announcement; the deal was really about using real estate, not about a public/private partnership.

Way, way, way back in 1997, when Paul Allen invested in this little idea about putting high-speed, mobile-enabled wireless networks using unlicensed spectrum across entire cities and in airports, the only problem was that high-speed meant 20 to 30 Kbps (later lifted to 128 Kbps). The unlicensed spectrum in question was 900 MHz, which propagates further, but the Ricochet technology was fairly inefficient and noisy compared to 802.11b, which emerged shortly after Ricochet’s launch. The service did work, and was a lifeline for people who needed mobile access and would have spent another $20 to $40 per month for a dedicated phone line at home if they couldn’t get broadband. (Read this great user review from about 1998; another by Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software from 2000.)

While Ricochet was mobile (external, battery-powered modem), it was expensive ($80 per month is the rate I’m finding), and started coming into its own just as broadband was hitting double-digit percentages of people’s homes, and “56K” modems were becoming popular. If you could get 1 Mbps or faster at home over broadband or even 56K over a $20 per month dial-up service, you didn’t need Ricochet. Further, cellular operators had already integrated modem-speed networking into cell phones and PC Cards, offering a taste of mobile networking that was often easier and more ubiquitous than Ricochet.

Metricom was fairly unwieldy. They raised hundreds of millions—including $300m from Allen’s Vulcan Ventures and $300m from the late, unlamented WorldCom—and built the network fast. But the technology was out of date by the time it was installed, and the service price too high for casual users, and not useful enough for business travelers. Hot spots started to appear nationwide in 2001, and the combination of broadband, early cell data, Wi-Fi, and early hotspots just pithed Ricochet’s potential.

Metricom ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and its assets were sold for about a penny on the dollar to Aerie Networks ($8.25m) late that year. In summer 2002, Aerie resurrected the network in Denver and later San Diego. Aerie sold Ricochet to EDL Holdings in 2003, which then sold it to YDI Wireless (now Terabeam) in 2004. (YDI took its new name from the acquisition of Terabeam, which itself once had over $500m poured into it, until it was sold to YDI for a tenth that. YDI’s business plan has been to buy flagging wireless firms and then bolster their product lines. They also bought Proxim and KarlNet.)

For sheer chutzpah, you just have to love this item in The “About Civitas” section of the press release: “Civitas Wireless Solutions, LLC, d.b.a. Ricochet Networks, is the only Managed Service Provider in the wireless Internet industry with a decade of experience operating large-scale wireless deployments.” Well, technically true, but puhhhhhhh-leeeeeeeze. That’s only true if you count some of the equipment mounted in Denver as continuous employees of the company.