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Rio Rancho, New Mexico: 103 Square Miles of WiFi
An anonymous reader submits "Rio Rancho, New Mexico is going to have 103 square miles of wifi coverage thanks to Intel & Usurf. The Albuquerque International Airport also has free wifi available. (By the way, Rio Rancho also has one of the largest chip factories in the world. Owned by Intel of course.)" The airport service will be free, but though the site is coy about pricing, users will need to sign up (and pay) for the Rio Rancho mesh network. Update: 06/20 03:56 GMT by T : Rio Rancho, not Rio Ranch. Mea culpa.
Rio Rancho borders Albququerque (my home) and that's about 1M people in the area
The whole of Albuquerque is moving that direction. Solely due to Intel. People who live all the way across town are moving there for the cheap house prices. Props to them for building and supporting a community. They're spurring a lot of good development in Albuquerque.
I would shudder to think of what would happen to that whole area if Intel shut shop.
Rio Rancho is basically the technical arm of Albuquerque. It's a quasi-suburb that's outgrowing Albuquerque itself, and everyone is moving out there. It's also threatening to totally surround Bernalillo.
Yea, the radio stations out here can suck. But you get one hell of an uninterrupted drive. Half the highways are empty, and you can feel totally alone and just cruise. Combine that with warm summer nights, and it's amazing.
For pete's sake, timothy, it's "Rio Rancho", not "Rio Ranch". The submitter spelled it correctly twice, and you didn't double-check before "correcting" it for the title?
The scum of the earth will use every piece of open infrastructure that exists in the world. This is no different.
Bank robbers walk right into banks without being somehow stopped at the door. Muggers walk along the sidewalk without somehow being prevented from doing so.
Why? Because to implement safeguards that "stop" the scum require a level of inconvenient intrusions into the 9x% "good" people's privacy and efficiency.
Further, pedophiles getting pictures is the last thing to worry about on that topic... I think the authorities would worry more about pedophiles uploading pictures via an anonymous connection... and the evil deeds done to make the pictures. Which is something they currently have to deal with anyway on the Internet at large... one more anonymous entry point doesn't really change the picture... and in fact, helps the situation. Picture this scenario:
FBI pinpoints the initial upload of some child porn to an anonymous connection at AP xyz on an open wifi network. They have a date-time value and a physical location! The sense of anonymity aforded by open APs can also be a foil, as the authorities proceed to request local surveilance footage from any cams in that area. It turns out being less anonymous than whatever obfuscation methods pedo posters use now. This is a good thing.
Note, 103 square miles (10x10, roughly), not a 51.5 mile radius ;-)