EarthLink and Google have submitted a joint proposal to the city of San Francisco for its planned citywide Wi-Fi network, combining a free service to be operated by Google with a paid service tier offered by EarthLink.

The partnership grew out of the two companies’ ongoing relationship and reflects their best chance to meet San Francisco’s requirements, said Bill Tolpegin, vice president of planning and development for Earthlink’s municipal networks unit.

“It hits a home run in terms of being directly responsive to their needs,” he said in an interview. “They set the bar pretty high in terms of what they needed a wireless network to do. One of the biggest things they said was they wanted a component of the network to be free citywide. That was a new thing we’ve seen in terms of requirements.”

While both EarthLink and Google will share in the initial investment in building the network and in its ongoing operational costs, Google will power the free portion of the network, offering a lower-speed access citywide, and EarthLink will power the subscription portion, Tolpegin said.

If successful in its bid for the San Francisco network, EarthLink will be testing yet another model for muni wireless, in addition to the Philadelphia and Anaheim networks it is building for those cities and the Minneapolis network it will trial beginning next month. The Philly network involves free access to some services, such as government information, but does not provide free Web browsing, Tolpegin pointed out. In Minneapolis, EarthLink is a finalist with U.S. Internet to provide citywide coverage with the city government as an anchor tenant.

“That’s the point of doing this--we need to test and learn and try a number of different models to see what works,” Tolpegin said. “We’ve looked at the business case for a service, for a portfolio of offerings, where one is a free service. We’ll have to see how it works--there are still a fair amount of assumptions being made.”

To date, the business models are varying widely, depending on a multitude of factors including political, geographic and business case differences among the cities, he added, but ultimately that should boil down to a smaller number of business models, perhaps even one, with variations.

“Right now, each city has very unique needs and unique requirements, and there are some cities that don’t think they need to even go through the RFP process,” Tolpegin said. “I think it will settle down to a couple of models or even one model with a couple of different components. The subscription piece is one constant--the real question is going to be what else you are going to have in terms of subscriptions.”

Bringing Google onboard provides “well-capitalized people who can bring a strong user experience to those kinds of access methods,” he added.

Company officials announced the RFP through blogger Earthling, releasing a statement by Donald Berryman, executive vice president of EarthLink and president of the ISP’s municipal networks unit.

“This proposal presents a unique opportunity for both companies,” Berryman said in the statement. “By coming together to leverage the strengths of both companies, we will be able to offer services to different customers on the network that fit with their own individual needs and wants. Fundamentally, this RFP is in line with EarthLink’s belief in ‘open access’--that these municipal networks should offer the tools, services and applications that businesses, governments and consumers want to use to enable, enrich and empower their Internet experiences.

“Customers shouldn’t be tied to their desks, or to a single provider, to get the Internet experience they want,” Berryman concluded. “Both EarthLink and Google recognize this and are attempting to provide great service and choice in San Francisco.”