Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Wi-Fi? Why Not?

...
Heck if I can find anything wrong with this:

About 95 percent of Springfield would get free wireless Internet access under a
tentative deal announced Tuesday by Mayor Tim Davlin and representatives of
AT&T.

Residents could use the service at no charge at certain speeds but would have to view advertising. Vicki Jones of AT&T said the free speeds would likely start at 200 kilobits per second, about four times faster than dial-up service.

Residents could pay a to-be-determined fee for higher speeds, which would deliver as much as 1 megabit (or about five times as fast as 200 kilobits) of data per second, she said.

The free service would cover 25 to 30 square miles, roughly 47,000 homes and areas where people congregate, Jones said

Check out the entire SJ-R article. It’s nothing but good news. The city and it’s residents pay almost nothing and we get the internet through the air.

Gee, going smoke-free AND getting Wi-Fi. What city are you and what have you done with the lazy backwater I used to know?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow. The comments at the SJ-R are just mind-boggling. People are bitching about free wifi. I agree with you, Dave. This is great. If it works out, super. If it doesn't, the taxpayers aren't on the hook for it. How can you beat that? I wouldn't use it too often, but it'd be great for when I want to use my laptop at lunchtime.

I have a few minor quibbles. I'd like to know how much screen real estate will be taken up by the ads, assuming this will work like net-zero did. If you never used net-zero, a bar ran horizontally across the screen, covering about 1/5th of it, and was always on top. It was somewhat annoying, but still useful when nothing else was available. I'd also like to be sure that it's not a Windows-only service. And I think that 200kbaud is a bit slow, but competition would take care of that, assuming that others are allowed to offer similar services.

johnny