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."

Comments

Homeless

[killmenow]

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.

Re:Homeless

[Cruciform]

Some of them make a lot more money than most Slashdot readers.

I've talked to panhandlers that take in over $60 an hour tax free every day.

The homeless you see sleeping on the street are typically the mentally ill. They have options available to them for shelter but due to their mental condition they end up leaving for one reason or another.

I bet within 5 years of the wireless system being implemented you'll hear someone in office suggest that we should tag the mentally ill homeless so they can be located and retrieved when they wander from shelters.

Re:Homeless

[killmenow]

I've talked to panhandlers that take in over $60 an hour tax free every day.

That may be true and all; but, my experience tells me that for every Shaky Lady there are a dozen legitimately homeless people either mentally ill or drug addicted or something along those lines. I'm sick of hearing from people how we're being duped by unscrupulous cheats who just don't want to work and will sit there and scam people out of cash all day. You know what I think: more power to them. If it's such a lucrative career and will earn a person a cool $60/hr tax free every day, the "homeless" problem would be of epidemic proportions as millions of people living on $10/hr "changed careers" so to speak.

The homeless you see sleeping on the street are typically the mentally ill. They have options available to them for shelter but due to their mental condition they end up leaving for one reason or another.

I know. I actually spoke to some local Toronto(ans? ites?) and they said the same thing. In fact, I even watched a van with blankets and food stop by to check on several of them a couple times. I was told that's basically what the social services people do for them. They won't stay at the shelters so there's really little more they can do except just check on them, make sure they have food and blankets, etc. It's a fair bit more than what we do for them here in my little city.

I bet within 5 years of the wireless system being implemented you'll hear someone in office suggest that we should tag the mentally ill homeless so they can be located and retrieved when they wander from shelters.

I wouldn't be surprised. And in an ironic sort of way, it would fulfill a lot of the mentally ill paranoid delusions about the government trying to spy on them and track their every movement, etc.

Re:Homeless

[saforrest]

I've talked to panhandlers that take in over $60 an hour tax free every day.

I don't deny this happens — I've seen some cases myself — but I think it's talked about by passerbys like us much more than it really happens.

My rationale here is essentially that the reward of believing that all (or most) homeless people are scammers is the ability to walk by while ignoring their pleas, without a guilty conscience. That emotional "reward" is so powerful, especially for people that are confronted by homeless people regularly, that I can easily see all kinds of people choosing to believe it regardless of the evidence. Even you provided only one piece of circumstantial evidence.

There was a guy in London (Ontario) who used to sit on a busy corner in a wheelchair. I got a haircut across the street from this corner once, and the hairdresser said she'd seen the guy walk a block without trouble to a nearby Tim Hortons and get coffee with his earnings.

I had my suspicions about the guy too, and I don't doubt she was telling the truth. But the outrage in her voice and the exasperated sighs of the fellow customers said there was more going on here than just being pissed off at this guy.

Pisses me off.

[Yo Grark]

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

Re:Pisses me off.

[Qwavel]

You are right, but that doesn't make this project a bad thing for the city. It just means that we must watch and question this company like any other.

Go Canada

[jshackles]

This is just one more reason I need to move to Canada. As if I needed a reason.

How many cities?

[slagheap]

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?

Slagheap

Re:Signal strength

[gstoddart]

But will the hotspot be strong enough to reach Detroit?

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.

Re:Hundreds in Rochester Cheer

[Adult film producer]

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.

Bull

[ylikone]

>>I've talked to panhandlers that take in over $60 an hour tax free every day. Bull. Shit.

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.

Re:Dude. . .

[robinw]

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.