The wireless clock will soon strike midnight in the City of Brotherly Love, as EarthLink will soon shut down Philadelphia's municipal WiFi for good. EarthLink claims it was going transfer the network to the city of Philadelphia for free (as well as donate the WiFi equipment), but blames the conclusion of this months-long drama on the city's inability to get its act together. Current customers will have 30 days to transition to something else, and the plug will officially be pulled on Thursday, June 12.

"EarthLink has worked diligently for many months to transfer our WiFi network to a new owner—at no cost," EarthLink CEO Rolla Huff said in a statement today. "Unfortunately, our hope that we could transfer our network to a nonprofit organization that had planned to offer free WiFi throughout Philadelphia will not be realized. 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 announcement comes under a week after EarthLink gave the city its second (and apparently final) deadline to take the network off its hands. The company had stopped accepting new customers a week previous in anticipation of the possible shutdown. Philadelphia had reportedly been working to save the network without dipping into taxpayer funds, but never managed to figure out a solution.

EarthLink's decision to jump ship on Philadelphia goes back to last year, when the ISP decided there was no money to be made in municipal WiFi. This, of course, came after the company had already begun to help a number of cities launch municipal WiFi networks (including Philadelphia). In February, EarthLink hung a "for sale" sign on its WiFi business after announcing major losses as a result of the municipal WiFi projects.

When Philadelphia's WiFi network goes dark come June 12, it will mark the end of one of the first and largest citywide WiFi projects in the US. The move is reflective of overall problems in municipal WiFi, too. San Francisco's planned network has yet to launch (despite having been planned since 2005), and Chicago's was canned last August after the city butted heads with EarthLink and AT&T over the city using the network itself as an anchor tenant. On the other hand, Corpus Christi, Texas has managed to keep its network running just fine, due in part to the city's willingness to use the network to transmit data for its own services.

As part of EarthLink's announcement today, the company also filed a proceeding in federal court that will allow it to remove the equipment it had installed, including transmitters installed on lightposts. EarthLink requested that its potential liability for the takedown be no more than $1 million, and said that it doesn't expect the move to have any impact on its current financial outlook. It looks like EarthLink may have been headed to court anyway: Philadelphia councilman Frank Rizzo pointed out to the Associated Press that the network had yet to be completed and hinted at a possible lawsuit. "EarthLink knows they are vulnerable to litigation," he said.