City of London prepares for blanket Wi-Fi

From next week, WiFi firm The Cloud will beam its vibes though the heads of some 350,000 City workers while they feed at the trough of unbridled capitalism.

According to hotspot erector Niall Murphy at The Cloud, the hotspot will be the biggest in Europe.

"We have been meeting a lot of the big financial institutions in the area and have even found that the network is available in a lot of their boardrooms, so we think there will be a corporate use for it as well."

The service uses mesh technology to provide continuous access via a series of base stations dotted throughout the area.

Surfers will fork out around £12 per month for unlimited access. The Cloud says it is targeted at consumers and municipal workers. In addition to web access, the network can support public snooping services such as traffic surveillance and security systems.

Coverage will initially extend from the City to Soho, but the firm aims to cover the whole of the capital eventually. µ