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UK to get Public Wireless LAN
shanksd1 writes "The IEE Review for May reports that BT is announcing the UK's first public access wireless LAN, with a little help from Motorola and Cisco. 400 wireless hotspots of range 100m should be implemented by June 2003, and 4000 by June 2005. These 500 kb/s access points will be located in hotels, railway stations, airports, bars and
coffee shops."
Maybe its just a lack of caffeine, but I can't find anything regarding a wireless network on those two linked pages....
I couldn't find anything on the links provided above. Google found me this:
BBC
This isn't really feasable in the U.S. Our country has too small of a population density to make this really worthwhile on a federal government scale. The only way that I could see this happening in the U.S. is if each city paid for the wireless network then the Federal Government footed the bill for backbone access. Thus splitting the costs between local and national levels and making it affordable to each party involved.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
If you're a member on fark, someone has set up a pool. Sick bastards.
We all know it's inevitable. Quit jerking us around and get busy with it guys.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You are probably right about it being worse in bigger cities. Here is a link to a story about how easy it was for a reporter to gain access to wireless networks in Toronto.
The RA (equiv to FCC over here) has not actually licensed any commercial use of the 802.11 band here yet and it may be BT trying to force a decision from them.
As yet what they propose is illegal in the UK.
Consume the net anyone?
BT announced their intentions a while ago about getting into this space...The fact still remains that it is illegal in the UK sell 802.11b bandwidth at the moment (AFAIK). They are banking on the fact that the government will change the laws regarding this (It does seem fairly likely).
Once the laws have changed expect a lot more public for-profit WLAN's to emerge.
I can't wait until someone actually puts them in though. Broadband in public spaces is sorely missing. If BT were smart they would build a 802.11b/Bluetooth AP into every phone box in the country. You can already SMS/Phone/Internet access at all the new ones anyway, adding wireless would be a small cost increment.
/b
PS: It is legal to use WLAN in business in the UK but not to provide a commercial service from it. So having a WLAN connection in your cafe and chargin for it is not OK, having a WLAN in the office for staff to use is OK.
[Please type your sig here.]
Actually it's not just bad style, it's a violation of the URI syntax (RFC2396).
Even further: RFC2616 (HTTP/1.1) recommends that spaces should be stripped out of the URI (at least the default squid.conf says so and I'm to lazy to verify that) - but I bet the result would be a 404 in this case.
We already have public access wireless in the UK - look at this for instance.
And this is running at a faster rate!
Then there are all the initiatives to setup free access WLANs:
http://www.bawia.org/wirelessnets.html