Nation's First City-Wide WiFi Network Completed

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'"

Comments

Releasing viruses into the wild...

[NeoGeo64]

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

No Kidding!

[DaedalusLogic]

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?

Re:How does this affect local ISP?

[Kphrak]

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.