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Niue Gets Island-Wide WiFi
NinjaPablo writes "Business Wire is running a story about the polynesian island of Niue. Niue has just completed an island-wide wifi network, making it the first country with nationwide free wifi access. This comes after countrywide email was started in 1997, dialup access in 1999, and broadband this Spring, all free for anyone."
But come on now, that doesn't even count! 2000 people? The UC Berkeley system is ten times that, and they're even thinking of installing campus-wide wifi.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Spammers can make use of the unrestricted wifi to spam to their hearts delight.
Would the place become a base for spam corporations?
Did it strike anybody as strange that they gave nationwide email to a country two years *before* they gave dialup?
What good is email if you can't access the internet?
With the limited range of WiFi, they'd need a station in every house, and the financial burden of an undertaking like that would be immense. I'd imagine that, since they have broadband, they can cut some pretty cheap bulk deals around maybe $50 per station, but the costs would still be astronomical, and from the looks of the article, they are saying that there is a blanket of WiFi over the ENTIRE island. Essentially, everywhere you see a transformer on a telephone, you'd have to see a base station, but really, the interference from such electricity would cause problems, so they probably alternate. I am guessing that other than by taxes, the biggest way they are paying for all of this is from tourism, which apparently is large for such a small island. I'm betting that within two years, they'd be able to pay off the addition, and after that, it would merely be a matter of the funds to maintain the system, which will also get costly.
I came, I saw, She conquered.
No.. but probably a lot of the money came from Sweden.. since the .nu-domain is quite popular here. (FYI. in swedish the word nu means now)
- I choked on the red pill and now I'm stuck in limbo
I own several .nu domains myself, and they don't come cheap (to just change your dns server listings - or any other setting - costs $10 [which can be avoided by waiting until it comes time to renew the domain]). I'm just glad to hear that all that money is going to a good cause, unlike many other tlds such as .ws, .tv, etc. which are marketed as entirely american and without any significant benifit to the countries for which they were originally created.
See how much better things work in small societies where everyone feels like a significant part of the whole? This is why we Americans need to lay the smack down on our Federal government and give the power (read "money") back to our state and local governments. If your city council got the lion's share of your tax dollars, you might have free Wi-Fi, too.
Screw this blood-for-oil bullshit! I want my free Wi-Fi!
Isn't WLAN supposed to be quite sensitive to rain and humidity? Microwaves generally lose a lot of energy to water molecules - ergo microwave ovens.