Slashdot Mirror
Austin Becoming Wi-Fi Hot Spot
Omega1045 writes "The Austin Chronicle is running an interesting article on how Austin is fast becoming the Wi-Fi Capital of the Free (as in beer) Wireless World. With the industry standardization board Wi-Fi Alliance moving to Austin earlier this year, and groups like Austin Free-Net helping local businesses, the article quotes Austin has having more hotspots 'than anywhere else on the planet'. While this article does quite a bit of bragging about Austin, it also does a great job of highlighting how businesses and local non-profits can work together to promote and profit from free Wi-Fi Internet access. This provides an excellent model for other cities to follow using tools like Less Network."
So you can get free wi-fi...
.
.
.
but you have to live in Texas.
-Letter
I'm moving to Austin. Err, once I move out of my parent's basement.
I live in a small town -with wal*mart being our nearest retail store- and I chuckle every time I see their WiFi cards, routers, etc sitting and gathering dust.
The nearest hotspot is most likely 12 miles away!
Here comes the child porn surfers driving around with no pants on.
Drugs are bad.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but I looked closer at the picture in the article of Richard MacKinnon, captioned as part of the Austin Wireless City Project. He has a rather conspicuous power cable plugged into his laptop.
:)
Wireless? I think not.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
I believe it's a somewhat polluted city, so I'd be concerned about WiFi performance. Would WiFi Speed Spray do the trick??
WiFI Speed Spray
The parent post was not insightful. It was clueless.
bp
...and WiFi the Austin Moontowers.
Give you a better reason to move to Austin? Well, apparently Austinites have forgotten about the little agreement that we all had, but the original plan back ten years ago was to not let out the secret that Austin is a great place to live, thus not encouraging hoardes of people to move here and spoil the paradise.
But noooo, MTV did a special on cool places and pointed out that Austin was definitely one of them, and, well, the whole thing really went downhill once John Travolta -- yes JOHN TRAVOLTA -- paid a visit to local restaurant Threadgill's. It signalled the beginning of the possible end to Austin's cool nature when Hollywood nerds like Travolta came here apparently (one would have to assume) only because they'd heard Austin was cool.
I'll give the people who aren't with me so far a little more clue what I'm talking about: the source of Austin's coolness isn't and never was anything to do with Hollywood. Nor Starbucks, nor The Gap, though those kinds of places are all up and down The Drag now, which is itself a definite drag.
Oh well, at least we still have some cool stuff going on, and the dot-com post-boom bust drove some of the yuppies away, which I guess can't be an entirely bad thing.
Anyway, to get back to the point: it's a little too late, but Austinites, the deal is that you're NOT supposed to tell your friends how cool Austin is and that they should move here. The whole place is already too gentrified without a zillion people moving here and driving up real estate prices further.
Ah, I guess I'm just going to have to give up and move south of the river like everyone else who "gets" Austin.