Town gives free wifi to all
Never mind the cost... think of the children
Thursday, 22 January 2009, 12:34
A SMALL ITALIAN town is giving all its citizens a free WiFi connection. Soveria Mannelli, in Calabria, allows free Interweb connection without wires from every corner of the municipality for nothing.
Citizens have set up a website and a 'WiFi desk' from which you can register and receive the access to the network.
In other countries, such networks have been stopped by the local phone companies who have been miffed to see taxpayer money being spent putting private operations out of business. µ
L'Inq
Macity
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Needs to stuff it.
Way to go small town!!!
If we were half as smart in Canada, all of our major centers would have Municipal Fiber. Yes More expensive then free Wifi, but just think what better way to feed our new fangled info economy, then local fibre?
Grid lock, whilst the transportation infrastructure is being upgraded; no problem. Municipal Fibre, and off site work is a breeze! Hell, if we take the idea of net neutrality to its logical end point, a completely covered city with fibre, would allow all private players a massive network to play with, and to feed with their back bones to their subscribers. Considering the advances in localizing bit torrent traffic; such a system would drastically reduce the inter city load as popular 'stuff' was picked up by the first few to become local seeders with massive 'local' speeds.
Not to mention, the long term amortization of such a project is easily handled via fair access fees to those providers, or a suitable investment of their own fibre based networks.
We don't need 3 or 4 different firms laying various segments and trunks; we need a unified very high speed fibre network that all can play on, and sell to.
Well at least that's my 2 cents.
we've had free citiwide Wifi for years, from erm Earthlink, no erm Google, errrr.. no?
oh ok we got feckin lied to by the politicians as usual. Thanks a bunch.
If the people in that small town could figure out that they can actually use their private wifi equipment to set up the network, they might also be able to skip the registration. Then have the next town join the party. And that would be free as in speech and beer.
MEh. I live in Country Victoia Aus, Wodonga. Our council is setting up free WI-FI broadband access for the whole town over a cupla years, pop 38,000. Of couse P2P is to be heavily frowned upon. SUCK SHIT TELSTRA.
That is Victoria. Stupid R key is sticking.
in Oulu, Finland we've had free, and for the past few years even add-free wi-fi that nowadays covers most of the city and the university. Works decent even with p2p.
In our small town we get free booze. Just head down the local pub and present your small town citizen's ID and you get a pint. No charge. No catch. That's where our taxpayer money goes.
The INQ is gonna love it here.
Corpus Christi ,Texas did this same thing free wifi equiptment bought with the tax payers money.The system was set up to read new wireless gas and water meters saving the city money on hiring meter readers. Also city workers could access the internet and city service sites from laptops in the field. After about a year of free net for the citizens, the city turned around and sold the public access to Earthlink. So no more free internet for it's citizens who paid for all the gear.Now it's plug and pay!