By Jacqui Cheng
May 13, 2008 - 06:30PM CT

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).