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Nation's First City-Wide WiFi Network Completed

Posted by timothy on from the depends-who's-defining-things dept.

According to a reader rockwellpa, Grand Haven, Michigan has recently completed the United States' first truly city-wide WiFi nework. According to the press release, "Other cities have announced intent to build similar networks or have announced partial deployments; in contrast, the Grand Haven implementation, by Ottawa Wireless Inc., is the first full and complete city-wide WiFi deployment in the country. 'As the first WiFi city in America, Grand Haven has truly lived up to its name in the Internet era, as we now allow anyone anywhere to connect to the Internet and roam the city and waterways in a completely secure computing environment'"

11 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Public Access Locations by artlu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Does anyone know the logistics of where they placed the access points? Were they connected to telephone polls or traffic lights? How about weather? Michigan does get snow and if the access points are outside, what type of protection do they have.
    Finally, if one access point crashes do the rest break as well?

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  2. Releasing viruses into the wild... by NeoGeo64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This town will soon become a favorite stop for people looking to anonymously release viruses into the wild.

    1. Re:Releasing viruses into the wild... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Which will in turn be used as a means of installing a London-esque CCTV system. "Okay, our logs show that the virus was sent from the corner of 1st and 8th at 12:04PM. Let's go back to our surveillance video. Oh, yeah..we have a plate number now."

  3. So it begins by Fryth · · Score: 1, Insightful

    As more cities follow suit, and wireless bandwidth and security are improved, we are going to be living in a connected world beyond yours or my dreams. Mark my words.

  4. No Kidding! by DaedalusLogic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Isn't it inherently insecure since the public can access it? What are they going to do... register MAC addresses of adapters? What are they going to do when those are spoofed? I think that wide ranging public access to the internet via 802.11 anything is a bad idea. Is anyone else with me on this? What's the motivation for doing this to an entire town?

  5. Vague press release by StateOfTheUnion · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The press release seems rather lacking. It doesn't say anything about whether the intention of this project was to get wireless into homes or residential areas or not. It only cites an area of 6 square miles as the goal. Was this in residential, government, or business areas? Is this the entire city limits or a small portion? Is it only in public areas (streets, parks & goverement buildings)? Are there holes in the coverage? 'Citywide' could mean that a significant areas is covered across the city but that there might still be significant gaps in the coverage.

    I for one am unimpressed. The press release is simply too ambiguous.

  6. Re:Is it me, or is this service really... by mrscorpio · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't know, but if I needed this service, I'd probably still have my cable internet at home for all my downloading and stuff. This is just going to let me conduct my business activities anywhere.

  7. Free? by toetagger1 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Do they also provide free Electricyt, Phone, Water, and Garbage Removal up there? I don't understand why people think that having FREE wirless internet access is something that is a required thing of the future. It wouldn't surprise me of seeing wirless companies picking up the trend and offering wirless internet service (either through the same band as the voice service, or a different one), and people would pay a monthly subscrcription. That sounds more plausible than FREE.

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  8. I doubt it. by twitter · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Anonymous? I don't think so. It's not a free service, so I imagine they have a client that identifies the user for billing purposes. That's no more anonymous than dialup or cable operations. Nor are those other more expensive alternatives any more secure. As the waves of spam, virus and malware continue to be released without any accountability at all, it's clear that all commercial and government attempts to follow users around only affect honest people. Real criminals have armies of broken Windoze boxes on cable modem services to do their bidding.

    The problem is not wifi or the internet, it's Windoze.

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  9. Re:How does this affect local ISP? by Kphrak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I would be against this sort of thing being provided by the local government. This is not the purpose of government.

    The local government is actually the perfect place for it if enough people in the city actually want it. There is nothing wrong with a small government, participated in at a local level, voting for a convenience for the city.

    Of course, the above is in a perfect world. City governments are often owned by special interests such as corporations, or even a local mafia -- both of whom try to get the voted-on service outsourced to themselves. In my city, the local city council often votes for the most expensive and least useful things it can get (right now, for instance, there's a movement to get a major league baseball team, and a multi-billion-dollar project to bury all the reservoirs in a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 just got cancelled -- but not after spending 4 million dollars on preparation for it). It really depends on how involved the citizens of the city were in the decision.

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  10. The Real Story by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I live in Grand Haven and work in IT. This service is nice, but not all it is cracked up to be. First, it is relatively slow, second, there are big holes in the coverage, at least for now. I've spent some time snooping around with my Powerbook, and there are many locations inside the city boundaries where there is no signal.

    I use the service because it lets me go down to my favorite coffee shop and use my Powerbook, and because it is a great idea. I hope it gets better (faster, better coverage) as it matures.