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New Orleans to Deploy Free Wi-Fi City Wide
Lawrence_Bird writes "The Washington Post is reporting that New Orleans will deploy a city wide wi-fi network with free public access. Much of the equipment has been donated, but New Orleans will own and operate the network. Interestingly, they are only able to do this while a state of emergency remains in place as technically their planned 512Kbps service violates state law prohibiting municipalities from offering access at speeds in excess of 144Kbps, a restriction the city plans on fighting even though they will eventually outsource the whole operation."
Free WiFi while significant portions of their population are still displaced and / or homeless.
According to TFA, this will provide a huge time savings for inspectors and police. The WiFi is directly improving rebuilding efforts in a number of ways. It's likely much easier and cheaper to provide free wireless for it all than it is to set up a security mechanism to give access only to government officials.
Perhaps their priorities are thought out well?
Most of New Orleans has power, cable, internet, etc., and power is not the government's responsibility in the first place, it's Entergy's responsibility and they're working about as fast as can be expected given the conditions.