On Tuesday Earthlink announced that it has won the bid to develop Philadelphia’s muniwifi system. With Google’s recent announcement of its muniwifi interest, it’s beginning to look like the telco anti-muniwifi lobby is on the ropes.

Rogers and Bell have announced a pre-Wi-Max JV to bring wireless broadband to Canada, but it’s hard to see the possibility of any serious interest by anyone else in wifi for any Canadian city yet, which is a crying shame. We just don’t have any independent ISP’s with the backing to do it, and we are too far down the food chain to attract the attention of the Googles of the world. We need a strong independent to help shake up telecomm in this country and bring down consumer pricing.