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."

Comments

seriously

[spectrokid]

Is this the beginning of the end? Can ADSL/Cable companies compete with this stuff?

This Will Be Interesting to Say the Least

[Wicked187]

I think getting to work on this project would be quite fun. You get to be involved in a large deployment. And, a deployment like this is never over... so there is some sense of jobs security. A lot of you will say negative things, it is the Slashdot norm, but hey, it is driving innovation... everything bad about can be experienced on the Internet as a whole, this just makes it easier. So, please keeps the negative comments to a minimum... This project really needs all the support it can get. It has a big chance for failure all by itself, it does not need any help there. But, if it is successful, that is another win for geeks around the world!

Reminds me of Tesla

[jabex]

All this talk about large scale wireless reminds me of Tesla and some of his crazy ideas http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_todre.html.

Although Tesla can be creepy sometimes. When he was trying to do something similar with his tower he said, "In this system that I have invented," Tesla explained, "it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth, otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip... so that the whole of this globe can quiver."

I hope they're planning on making sure those access points are gripping the Earth hard enough.

Ssome nations built around citizens, not investors

[Cryofan]

Taiwan also have nationalized healthcare. Medical care is very cheap there.

I hope you see that many nations are organized to better the quality of life of the CITIZEN, and not organized to maximize the profit of the investor.

Other nations are organized like livestock ranches built for the benefit of the investor.

Guess how America is organized....