|
It seems that free Wi-Fi is coming to the whole of British cities, with two
more free schemes announced today.
First off is Leicester Square in London which will allow both locals and
visitors to surf wirelessly. The eight Mbps line will have a fair use policy
designed to prevent one person from using all the bandwidth at once, so probably
not best to connect at really busy times.
"Who knows, we might even see the Square become a real hot spot for
online networking as more people learn about the service and start to take
advantage of it,"
"It seemed that somewhere as well known as Leicester Square should have a
free access point for people to use how they wish and when they wish" |
| Phil Ryan zone sponsor Four Communications |
Next Manchester City Council has unveiled plans to provide free wireless
internet access to 2.2 million people over an area of 400 square miles, covering
90 per cent of the Greater Manchester population.
Although no concrete plans have been made, the council is taking to
potential commercial partners to submit plans on how they might take part by
January 8, these groups include The Cloud, Pipex, BT, easynet and Metronet.
They also hope to attract funding from the government to the tune of £3 million
through the Governmentâs Digital Challenge Initiative, a scheme put in place to
counter 'digital exclusion'.
How this will affect both paid Wi-Fi operators, of which Manchester has six,
and users who use traditional broadband connections isn't known, although they
can't be too pleased with the plans.
A spokesman for the council said "This will be a transparent debate on how
best to replace our 19th-century infrastructure.", which makes you wonder what
it was doing last century.
|
