Metro WiFi Europe: Paris wants one
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If you love Paris, you would . Paris City council unveils its intention to blanket the whole city with a giant WiFi network.
The plan scheduled 400 hotspots by the end of 2007 and allows ISPs to expand the network with their own access points on “strategically-located public property”, says Reuters.
“The plan also calls for slashing taxes on companies that lay down fiber optic cables in a drive to have 80 percent of all buildings within the city connected to so-called ‘ultra-high speed’ fiber optic networks by 2010.”
Up to now, Paris Sans Fil, a resident associations, has been striving to deploy a citywide WiFi. With a minor success. The grassroots network, like Fon tactics, lacks WiFi-savvy people. And Ozone, a private sector company trying to provide the same free WiFi service to all Parisians, isn’t catching enough users.
The project will also experiment with free WiFi access for a city surroundings. We guess that depending of the economical factor and profitability of the situation, the whole network will turn or not into a free giant wireless network.
By 2007, several ISPs, including France Telecom’s Orange, will be launching their dual-mode mobile phones. Those devices would switch back and forth between the GSM protocol and the WiFi protocol, whenever they detect a hotspot at range.
If Paris’ citywide WiFi network will be free, Paris would be one of the only major cities in the world to provide free calls for all, for over 2 million people.
UPDATE, July 5, 2006 ― Mark Evans is right when he writes on his blog: “When you think about it, the real need for Internet access isn’t within municipalities but in rural communities where there is a single high-speed service provider or nothing all. It must be somewhat galling for someone who still has to live with dial-up service to see their urban cousins getting even more access choice.”
Jul 5, 2006 | By Nuno
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