Very proud: Former Philadelphia CIO Dianah Neff (pictured here in 2004) now works for the Wi-Fi consultancy she hired on behalf of the city.

As city officials from San Francisco and Philadelphia head to the consultancy they hired with taxpayer dollars, Earthlink is pulling its plans to provide free and cheap wireless internet access to some cities, saying they are asking too much.

This article (link, below) does an excellent job describing the cities’ poor planning. But it does not mention the company that may be responsible for much of this mess: Civitium.

Civitium is the consultancy now employing San Francisco’s former deputy CIO Denise Brady, and Philadelphia’s former CIO Dianah Neff. The cities paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Civitium’s advise, before each of these officials left their posts to join the company.

clipped from abcnews.go.com Municipal Wi-Fi Faces Financial Hurdles Huff informed San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom that EarthLink was rescinding a proposal to cover the estimated $14 million to $17 million cost of building the city’s Wi-Fi network. Had the San Francisco system been built, EarthLink planned to charge about $20 per month for Wi-Fi access that would have been three to four times faster than a free service subsidized by ads sold by Google Inc.