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Taipei to Cloak City in World's Largest Wi-Fi Grid
gollum123 writes "Reuters reports Taipei city planners are building what they say will be the world's biggest Wi-Fi network, making cheap, wireless Internet access available almost everywhere in the Taiwan capital. The project will build on the network available in Hsinyi, an up-and-coming shopping and financial district that is home to the world's tallest building, the 508-meter (1,667-foot) Taipei 101, and the city government headquarters. The city-wide network will be built by Q-Ware Corp., a unit of the Uni-President group, which also holds the 7-Eleven franchise in Taiwan. Q-Ware will deploy at least 20,000 access points throughout Taipei at a cost of US$70 million. Q-ware is aiming for a basic monthly fee of T$150-T$400 (US$4.5-US$12), far less than the T$800-T$1,000 (US$24-US$30) that fixed-line broadband providers demand in Taiwan. The network will cover 90 percent of the city by the end of 2005."
I'm reporting to you live from an apartment about one hundred yards from the Shi Da University campus in lovely downtown Taipei and I'm pleased to tell you that, although I'm on a landline DSL connection, Taiwan's Internet connectivity is quite GNU/Linux friendly and has been for many years so there is no reason to believe the wireless will be any different.
In fact, early on, the local ISPs were quick to provide free IP sharing routers with DSL connections. Many of those devices were really just embedded Linux systems. This was back in the days when ISPs in the US were still arguing whether you could have a home network on a brodband line. Here, quite to the contrary, the idea of sharing a connection between multiple PCs was being pushed by the ISPs. So making the best use of connectivity in the manner that the user sees fit has never been a real issue here since the advent of broadband. Intriguingly, in the modem days not so many years ago things were terrible. Once DSL came out though. everything changed for the better to put it mildly. That's is truly putting it mildly, the connectivity here is awesome. It's fast, cheap and hassle free and apparently just getting more so as time goes by.
But in terms of GNU/Linux in Taiwan, I might as well mention that I'm currently writing to you on an IBM Thinkpad notebook running BVA1L Knoppix which is a custom version of the Knoppix LiveCD with a pre-configured Chinese environment including a version of the Chinese character input system called XCin. I am led to believe this customized version of Knoppix is maintained by a local boy at Tai Da which is another university that coincidentally is also just down the street from where I'm camping out this evening. So far, it's mostly only the younger people who have caught on to the fact that there is finally a totally convenient way to use Chinese with a Linux desktop, but it's spreading fast because people in Taiwan hate to feel like they're getting left out of a trend.
As a matter of fact, the maintainer of this distro made a rather smart move by placing pictures of various cities from around Taipei as the default desktop so, as opposed to the generic Microsoft desktop experience, this system immediately creates a sense of recognition, pride and even ownership among the users. Just in the last month or so several Taiwanese people I've shown this to have dumped XP or 2K and stuck with a hard drive install of this distro. The key point is the character input that works with Open Office and Firefox but the little touches like the localized wallpaper also has a powerful psychological impact that makes people more willing to put up with having to mount devices and learn how to cut and paste the right way and these other trivialities. If people are not interested in a new system these minor issues are insurmountable, but if you create subtle motivation by massaging the edges and making things cozy and targeted precisely for a very specific audiance it is surprising how eager people can be to learn.
Hard to believe how fast things change, but people's tastes are fickle and the older alternatives have a great disadvantage in that once you were trendy in the past you've got a hell of a battle being trendy in the future.
So, if you're afraid GNU/Linux is being squeezed out of the action in Taiwan, you may relax because it is hardly the case.