President of EarthLink Municipal Networks, Don Berryman, spoke last night at the Louisiana Technology Council’s EarthLink Wi-Fi Tech Tuesday event. They discussed the planed service areas, bandwidth, and pricing. Apparently 300kbs will be free for all, but 1Mbps service will be available for a fee. It looks like $21.95 for a month, while smaller units of time are also available. Some of the details are mentioned at Earthlink’s corporate blog.

Particularly interesting:

… are the special radios (4210’s) that can be mounted in police, fire, and rescue vehicles and draw power from the vehicle. This makes an individual vehicle into a mobile hotspot, allowing rescue personnel to download things like blueprints and building plans at the scene, and a group of these vehicles can provide a temporarily internet access zone wherever it’s needed.

Interested residents can call 866-936-WIFI for information and network support, and there is this Earthlink site where you can get information about the rollout, and sign up to be notified when service is available in your area.

Also worth noting is BellSouth’s WiMax service. While not quite as portable it’s a great solution that’s available today.

“Lower Decatur Street is New Orleans’ WiFi Hotspot!”

Here’s the current list:

• Cafe Envie – 1241 Decatur Street
• Coop’s Place – 1109 Decatur Street
• J.C. Grocery Deli – 65 French Market Place
• Mojo Lounge & Cafe – 1140 Decatur Street
• Turtle Bay – 1119 Decatur Street
• Whirling Dervish – 1135 Decatur Street

Most of the access points listed are usable in neighboring establishments.

Happy Surfing.

UPDATE: Added the Whirling Dervish to the list. Thanks, Cian

UPDATE: Removed Sarafina’s  (This should get moved to a page, instead of being in a post, so it’s always on the sidebar)

• Header images now use the rotator script to display a random image with each page. There are several new header images to rotate. Photo submissions are welcome.
• We have a fancy new favorites/shortcut icon . It’s from a photo of the Decatur Street sign.
• Smart Update pinger plugin installed, so only new articles will ping the blogosphere.
• There is a fancy Google Map embedded in an iframe using the EzStatic plugin. WiFi, Streetcar stops, and nearby Points of Interest are listed.
• Mobile users can get their fix here via the WordPress Mobile plugin.
• Fixed a bug with PHP5 and the wp-cache plugin. Pages should load much faster.
• Edited some templates so that the author’s name is shown. More authors coming soon.
• Installed and configured the wpPHPMailer plugin, so that people actually get the password when they register. Our webhost has disabled the php mail() function so this is a good plugin.
• Uploaded the Obfuscate E-mail plugin, which makes it almost impossible for bots to grab our email addresses and leaves them human readable and with working mailto: links.
• There is a shiny new “Contact Us” page with scrambled email addresses.
• Added the FeedBurner plugin so that nifty RSS feed stats are generated. Loving the stats.