Slashdot Mirror
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$30) that fixed-line broadband providers demand in Taiwan. The network will cover 90 percent of the city by the end of 2005."
the technology will be outdated.
i am all for this but the technologies go out of date so fast, did they make it easily upgradable is the real question
No city that large has a cloaking device!
Thanks, now time to return to my fortress of dorkitude.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Is this the beginning of the end? Can ADSL/Cable companies compete with this stuff?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
... major ISPs and email service providers are already updating their spam filters and reinforcing their network firewalls in anticipation of the upcoming WiFi deployment.
I'm not sure I'd want it to be my primary net connection. Still seems somehow up in the air (no pun intended. Really!) with security standards, new 802.11x's, device incompatibility, poor Windows functionality, and weak Linux support for many chipsets. That said, this is really how it ought to work... ubiquitous, cheap access can only be achieved with wireless because of the infrastructure savings. This is a good start. Now let's nail down the standards.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
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.
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.
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.
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'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.