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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'"

6 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. How does this affect local ISP? by rice0067 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think the idea of city wide WIFI is nice, but how is it paid for? Do people still have cable modem at home? (or that silly phone line thing)
    With whole city wifi.. will people even use land lines for home telephone?

  2. Is it me, or is this service really... by iammaxus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... slow. If you go to http://www.ottawawireless.net/services/pricing.htm l, you see that they offer 256kbps for regular users. That's only about 5 times dialup. With modern websites, that really doesnt cut it.

  3. Not so fast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I live in Chaska Minnesota and we have had city run wifi internet access for a few months now. It's run by the City and it costs $15.99 a month. If you'd like more information, check out http://www.chaska.net/

  4. Free wifi? Already have that! by slashname3 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Free wifi is already available. Just connect to your neighbors wifi and surf the Internet over his cable connection. Works great and it is free.

    At least until they catch on and setup encryption, but then that can be broken given a little time.

  5. Re:Public Access Locations by detritus. · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Here's a picture I took of one of the access points a few months ago. They are in NEMA weatherproof enclosures, with a support bar attached to an omnidirectional whip antenna (quite ugly - unfortunately I couldn't fit it all in the same picture). In addition, there's a flat directional antenna that obviously connects to another access point. I have also discovered the majority of the access points since they started to appear last fall, and have posted them to WiGLE .

  6. Roaming? by skaag · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How do these guys handle roaming? What happens when I move out of one access point and into another? Anyone here has an idea what happens (or lives in Grand Haven and can give us all a report from first hand experience?)

    I want to start an underground movement in my country where people all grant access to their accesspoints to the public, but then without roaming it's kinda silly.

    Thanks! :-)

    Skaag

    --

    All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...