David Pogue reviews four 802.11n routers, and finds only Apple’s meets most of the promise, Belkin second: Pogue was unable to achieve the highest speeds promised by these routers, except with the Apple AirPort Extreme. That may be because all these early routers are single band (2.4 GHz) except Apple’s. They may also all be much more susceptible to interface or back-off from adjacent networks, although Pogue isolated a lot of variables. As other reviewers have found, range is much better than bandwidth, but Pogue wasn’t able to get more than 49 Mbps from any device but Apple’s. …

The Houston city council appears to have set a record in approving a Wi-Fi network: EarthLink was declared the winning bidder just two months ago. Many larger cities have spent 8 months or longer getting from winning bid to council-approved contract. Houston will be an anchor tenant. The network is estimated to cost $40m. As in many other EarthLink-contracted cities, the vote for approval was unanimous. The network is currently the largest committed deployment at 600 sq mi. While county-wide networks and Wireless Silicon Valley …

Kite Networks provided answers to my questions on their network security: It’s certainly partly my fault due to timing issues, and Kite was polite enough to provide some follow-up answers to my recent article on Metro-Scale security. As I expected, Kite is following a similar course to EarthLink and MetroFi in securing end points, backhaul, and their users’ access. Follow the link to read the updated article.

Broadband Reports notes that they weren’t alerted it was “citywide Wi-Fi is over-hyped” week: I didn’t get the memo, either, but it appears to be a week in which much is written about networks that fail to live up to their expected potential. BR runs through stories already posted here, but there’s another one: MetroFi’s Foster City network has achieved 60 percent citywide coverage after six months, rather than a promised 95 percent. The problem here isn’t equipment or intent, but rather …

GigaOm rounds up the low subscriber numbers at early metro-scale Wi-Fi networks: They note the SF Chronicle story from yesterday about Taipei’s underrun on necessary subscribers; point to Lompoc’s 281 subscribers on a $3m network, where 4,000 are needed to break even (based on a 2003 analysis); and to criticism of MetroFi’s first-phase Portland, Ore., rollout. EarthLink wouldn’t give Katie Fehrenbacher usage numbers for their early networks.Fehrenbacher concludes that mobile workforce applications will …