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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$30) that fixed-line broadband providers demand in Taiwan. The network will cover 90 percent of the city by the end of 2005."
They're just saying that the APs will be physically attached to the lights, not that the traffic lights will be controlled by them. It's just like what Richochet did years ago; it's a lot cheaper than finding where to put all-new towers, overcoming resistance to them and then building them.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
the technology will be outdated.
i am all for this but the technologies go out of date so fast, did they make it easily upgradable is the real question
No city that large has a cloaking device!
Thanks, now time to return to my fortress of dorkitude.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Is this the beginning of the end? Can ADSL/Cable companies compete with this stuff?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
... major ISPs and email service providers are already updating their spam filters and reinforcing their network firewalls in anticipation of the upcoming WiFi deployment.
I'm not sure I'd want it to be my primary net connection. Still seems somehow up in the air (no pun intended. Really!) with security standards, new 802.11x's, device incompatibility, poor Windows functionality, and weak Linux support for many chipsets. That said, this is really how it ought to work... ubiquitous, cheap access can only be achieved with wireless because of the infrastructure savings. This is a good start. Now let's nail down the standards.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Finally, a tinfoil hat to cover an entire city, maybe we can finally start freeing our selves from these cumbersome cloaking devices.
What will be the human cost factor? How many war drivers will be put out of business?
I know of several cities that are supposed to be putting in free WiFi for their citizens. This will put more and more ISPs into the economic trashheap. This can't be allowed to continue! Soon the economic impact will upset the whole applecart!
Join us now, before it's too late!
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HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Politics, Life, and More on my Aspiring for the Future
The People's Republic of China has placed an order for 20,000 cans of Pringles.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.
Like Teddy with an elephant gun.
Only if everyon'e using maximum bandwidth continuously (highly unlikey). And even then, you can have multiple networks on multiple channels in the same geographic area.
Thats always make me wonder if big WiFI manufacturers like Linksys (Cisco), D-Link, 3com, NetGear, SMC, etc.. Will ever use the D2D technology. (1500 feet Wifi)
:)
I see this company has his products out for a long time now, but i never heard anyone mention it.
D2D Technology
In theory, if you use 1 antenna every 1500 feets, vs 300 feets, its supposed to cost less for the city
Anyone use that ? Whats your thought about it.
I'm sure I'm not the only geek curious to know whether the city will use standard consumer Wifi APs from Linksys, DLink or the like, or go for either custom or industrial-level (Cisco) hardware?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Here are a couple of links from their site.
Wireless Mesh Networks
Taipei Mesh
Ok that's it, i'm off to TaiPei to open a tinfoil hats shop.
I'm going to be RICH!
Anything you do can get you slashdotted, including nothing.
Its interesting to hear their plan - that it will cost $70m to cover 105 miles of Taipei and they will charge for user access. Here in Philadelphia a plan was announced to cover our 135 square miles for $10m in up-front costs and $1m per year in on-going costs w/ no access fees. I've decried the plan here (in Philadelphia) as ridiculous since the day it was announced. If I had to guess, I would say the private industry in Taipei that is setting up this network is being much more realistic than our soundbite-seeking John Street led government here.
With all these WiFi networks springing up, don't they interfere with each other? Esp when people are planning to have city-wide WiFi networks.
What happens when WiFi networks interfere with each other? commercial vs noncommercial? public vs private?
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....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I saw an interview with those responsible for implementing Seattle's WiFi system, and they were showing off large banks of antennae that were even larger than cell sites. They even commented on how they had to specially design much of the system, since there were no acceptable off-the-shelf solutions.
Someone's not telling the full truth.
Taipei is about 27Kha (2.7megares?) in area, with about 2.7M people - that's about 100 people per hectare. Over 20,000 access points will mean about 1 per hectare. Since 802.11 covers about 200m radius max (about 100m radius at full bandwidth), that could put every AP within the range of 4 or 8 others, or even 24 others. That means a mesh with very high redundancy for routing, bandwidth and high-availability. And even 802.11g (to say nothing of WiMax) offers up to 110Mbps - which is about 1Mbps per person in the hectare. Very dense areas could have extra APs, to the max of about 1.7Gbps, with every 802.11 channel filled, for over 16Mbps for each user. Combined with lots of wired AP interconnects to the Internet, those 50+% broadband users in Taipei are going to get a lot more mobile, in just the next year. Sounds like a great market for Slashdotter app development.
--
make install -not war
Note that it will cover 90% of the city by the end of 2005. That's just a year away.
Here in America, we make plans like "Scientists will launch a robotic mission to Mars... by 2009." or "We will return to the Moon... by 2010." We never say "Such-and-such big technological plan will be in effect... by the end of next year."
We move so slowly, like the lumbering elephant we, as a nation, are.
Eventually, the more nimble nations will simply overtake us if we don't stop miring every project we undertake in red tape...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
If you ever go to Taiwan, you will understand the significance of this very well.
In Taiwan, 7-Eleven is not just incredibly common, they are also important, being like a fourth branch of government. There is usually one, sometimes two, 7-Elevens on every block. Even in Tainan, a far more rural city, there would literally be 7-Elevens two or three minutes apart. And along with selling food, software and cell phones, 7-Eleven is where people go to pay their bills, as well as being part of the National Retail Lottery.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
There is literally a 7-Eleven on nearly every street corner there. If every one of their stores had an access point, nearly the entire city would easily have coverage.
I'm sure they already have some sort of network linking the stores. You can already pay your utility bills, parking tickets, etc. there (when you pay they scan a bar code printed on the bill and the transaction goes into the system). They also have copy and fax services, private parcel deliveries, and Slurpees. Its like a Quick-E-Mart and Kinko's rolled into one.
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.
Deepening the ability to not think about disturbing trends and to accept irrational behavior is largely the point of fuzzing people's minds with electronic goo. It works and it's real and everybody, particularly in this forum, ought to know better by now, and yet. .
The funny thing about direct changes made to the brain are that they are very hard to notice exactly because the organ you use to notice things is that which is being affected. --Gary Busey, who suffered minor brain damage as a result of a motorcycle crash, (without a helmet), explained that he didn't grasp how hurt he was until he realized that he couldn't figure out whether to put his shoes or socks on first, and simply couldn't cognize his way out of the puzzle. Up until then, he just thought he had regular wounds. The world, besides the physical pain, seemed normal.
The effects of EM radiation within the spectrum and power levels used by Cell and wireless technology has been demonstrated to impede brain function, to make subjects more docile and confused.
But the spread of this technology is rampant. --The region I live in has cut a deal with the Telcos to install a lot of Cell towers. The tactics used to lock this deal were corrupt; the representative from the Telco was the daughter of a sitting house member, copies of a significant petition were intercepted and prevented from entering the debate on less than legal grounds, and in general, the politicians were arrogant gits with Cell phones. I was there in local parliament to see it all go down.
Very simply, with the amount of crap Bush and the Military Industrial Complex is pulling today, it is important that the population be as stupid and placid as possible. How much television do you watch per day? Have you gotten your mercury-containing flu shot yet?
I do notice, however, that the reality of this world is slowly beginning to sink in. The deflating economy, the stupidity of the war, (which some of us knew in advance was going to be another Vietnam), the accelerating melt-down of the bio-sphere, the increasing fascism in the U.S. . . It's all growing more obvious, more impossible to ignore. People are far more often growing thoughtful rather than laughing tin-foil hat jokes.
Which is good. We're not here to ignore this.
-FL