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Toronto to Become One Huge Hotspot
8127972 writes "The Toronto Star is reporting that Toronto Hydro is about to announce plans to make all of Toronto Canada a huge wireless hotspot. The project could go live as early as this fall and hopes to bring low cost Internet access to millions of Toronto citizens. In the process it will challenge the Canadian telcos for a share of the $8 billion (CDN) a year wireless market."
What $8 bln CDN /yr wireless market? I live in Canada and there aren't any public wireless providers that I've heard of, though Bell/Rogers are planning to develop one. Do they mean like, cell phones? Or selling wireless routers?
Well, I spent a week in Toronto once. There were seemingly a lot of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks every night. I'm not sure there is a better social service than making sure they have wireless Internet.
This is the same company that went to the regulators and begged to have a "debt repayment" charge added to every consumer regardless if you were part of the original debt problem. Imagine being able to charge customers for your incompetance and making it clear you were doing so!
You may think that having Toronto as one huge hotspot, and I might even think it was cool too if these weren't true:
1. It's illegal to go off the grid.
2. I'm paying for Toronto Hydro's "debt" which consisted of millions of dollars in self-appointed executive bonuses, even when they had severly unbalanced budgets.
3. Toronto Hydro has blocked a lot of "green" ideas, every step of the way. Including subsidies to alleviate power problems.
4. We pay almost almost 10.00 per kw solar power/panel to make sure it's not a viable option.
5. Powering your house by Wind Power is illegal through "sound governance bilaws" even though the noise is quieter than an air conditioner.
6. They artificially "Froze" prices because of public pressure only to raise prices overall to MORE than it would have cost in the first place.
End Rant. Sorry, but it seems like a really cool thing, but like every other cool thing, this will come on the backs of those consumers who have no other choice but to allow them to spend money frivilously.
Yes I have options to go to "brokers", yes I have options to go "all gas", but when I investigated thouse routes, believe it or not, Toronto Hydro was the lesser of all evils.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
This is just one more reason I need to move to Canada. As if I needed a reason.
These types of stories pop up on Slashdot once in a while... "City X to implement citywide wireless". I was just wondering what other cities have announced such plans. Which ones actually have working systems today?
SlagheapFirst against the wall when the revolution comes
What should we, Ontario Hydro - a Crown corporation, do with our money? Invest it into a project that looks like it could generate a lot of revenue, or should we give it all away to shelter homeless people?
Definitely homeless people!
Okay, done that. Time to get back to our wifi project! What, people living under the poverty line? Check! Abused children? Check! 5000 other interest groups? CHECK!
Wow, 500 years later, after taking care of all those poor people, we can finally move onto our wifi project? Wait, what do you mean, taxes were supposed to take care of those projects instead of the corporation's money? Damn! I wish somebody told us about this first!
Guess what bud, not every organization's priority out there is to first shelter homeless people. Should we also put all road improvement projects on the hold too until all homeless people are off the streets?
You must be joking, right?
Maybe if the City of Windsor had decided to do this, your question would make sense, since they're across the river from each other.
Toronto is at least 3 hours drive away from Detroit -- and this is at 100kph/65mph -- you know, the entire length of Lake Eerie. Your laptop could never hope to broadcast back anything over those distances; the FCC would see to that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I live in a small village in Germany. Some weeks before I did a test.
I've passed all main roads with my PDA and a WiFi scanner. From around 200 hotspots (mainly home users), ~150 were were Open (no WEP or other encryption) and free to use.
As a corporate security guy working in Toronto, I'm not happy to read that Comrade Miller is going to make life that much more difficult for me. Thanks to this initiative, there will be a wireless network running (our building is right downtown) that users can switch to whenever they feel like accessing something that our content filters reject!
Quite right! Employees might also occasionally talk to their families and friends on company phones. They may be engaging in such scurrilous activities as looking out the window in their offices (assuming you don't have them all penned up in cubicles) at non-management-approved activities on the street. Why, they might even be using their brains to think about something not approved under company policy! My God, this must be stopped!
Fuckin' waaah. Deal with it, Agent Smith.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You're lying with stats.
You give the low-ball estimate as the Canadian percentage and the high-ball estimate as the American percentage. Tracking just declared guns, you get 7/32 for Canada and 60/250 for the US. These are similar percentages.
Canadian security is only at risk because of all the people we piss off. I don't blame the Canadians for not spending ungodly amounts of their governments money on a giant war machine, it's not their fight, they didn't start it... We did.
If this were really the case, we'd see a LOT MORE people out there begging rather than working at their crappy $10/hour jobs.
You are just spreading the conservative lies that the poor on the streets are lazy scammers. They are mentally ill. Not smart. Not rich.
Meh.
It's a slippery slope. One day they are building a wireless network, the next minute armed men are chasing 5 year olds. That's why everything the government does is automatically bad.
Just because you're ignorant doesn't mean you're smart.
Carl Sagan said it best himself: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I'm one of millions of residents of Toronto, and I've lived here for almost a decade. Never have I experienced, nor heard of anyone experiencing energy fields that made sleeping unbearable. I also know many other residents who don't have physical and stress problems.
You're asking a lot of people if you expect them to assume that you have some extra-sensory abilities to feel energy waves (and make energy bubbles). As far as I know there isn't a single scientific study that supports those findings. If there is, I'm sure you could make some money off of James Randi.
Instead of throwing around terms like ignorant, how about throwing out some evidence? And when I say evidence, I mean studies involving many people in controlled conditions, not just some odd feeling you got.