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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."
I've heard that Calgary, Alberta is looking at doing the same. Various companies in town have been asked to present proposals, ranging from cellular companies, telcos, isps, and tech firms. One of the latter I'm familiar with has proposed a cisco mesh solution using new aerospace gear. The plan is to use this network for emergency services and the like, at first anyway. Streaming video form security cameras to a squad car at 120mph for example. That = challenging for 802.11.
My name is coaxeus, and I approve this message. In fact, I think it is awesome.
Actually, all the wireless companies in Canada: Fido, Bell, Rogers, Telus have been working on developing something called Hotspot ahref=http://www.canadianhotspot.ca/advancedsearch .asprel=url2html-24218http://www.canadianhotspot.c a/advancedsearch.asp>
So I could walk around town using my voip phone instead of a cell phone? Maybe just my PDA with a VOIP client? GoogleTalk for all local calls!? w00t!
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
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!
Dvorak mentioned something in one of his columns sometime last year. Philadelphia was going to create a huge hotspot until the big boys got wind of what was going on. How did they deal with it? PAC -> State Legislature -> PAC -> Governor.
Bing Bang Boom.
Any towns or cities wishing to create a hotspot has to make it known publicly and give the commercial entities some time to decide what they want to do; i.e. right of first refusal, with a fourteen month window.
This is OTTOMH, but it's very close to what was reported.
I'm waiting to see how long it takes before VOIP are put into a similar position to where they cannot economically compete and will have to sell out to standard telcos. Or, standard telcos are provided some extra benefits in order to compete. I would view the 911 issue was one of the first arrows out of the quiver. Certain exceptions aside, nearly all monopolies were the result of gov't intervention "in the olden days" - ensuring they had enough of a market to remain competitive. These people are like Microsoft: they don't want to play second fiddle to anyone under any condition.
We're going to have to deal with something similar here in Indiana. Legislation has passed permitting telcos to compete head-to-head with cable systems. The issue was never raised, as most stats are not. 95% of the households in the US with access to cable have no choice regarding which cable provider. The cable lobbies said the telcos would only go after affluent markets (well, duh!) for better features and for some reason, that's not fair. The telcos said in competitive markets, cable prices easily dropped 25%. "Why would you want to pay 25% more for what you're already getting?" Boffins will observe a 25% discount is not the same thing as a 25% increase over the 25% discount. The telcos also promised "everyone who chooses the telco option plus those who subscribe to cable when that's the only [ground] option will have lower prices". That's a heck of a guarantee. I'd love to challenge them on a panel and ask them, "If that's not the case within five years, are you willing to pull out? If not, then why did you make that promise?"
This is a great idea.
1. Move to Toronto
2. Fire up packet sniffer of choice
3. Sniff a few million packets full of sensitive personal and financial data
4. ???
5. Profit!
But will the hotspot be strong enough to reach Detroit?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
In fact, Toronto has by far the most popular public library system in North America:
g ename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1 139007013815&call_pageid=968350130169&col=96948320 2845
from: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pa
"Lending out a record 30.4 million books, CDs and videos in 2005 -- a 5 per cent jump from the previous year -- the TPL now boasts a circulation that is a full third larger than its closest continental counterpart, Bryant says. "It's not that we're in the lead by a small margin," Bryant says. "The next busiest library system in the United States (in Queens, New York) is around 19 million items circulated."
those areas without lamp posts (unpopulated areas) will not receive any coverage
You'd be hard-pressed to find a place in Toronto that is not within 20m of a lamp post. Seriously, take a quick look. Even if this initiative is meant to include the "greater toronto area" (i.e. the city and its suburbs), every home will still be close enough to a lamp post. So there may be a few parks in the suburbs where you can't get WiFi at the centre of the park... but that's about it.
Of course, this is all assuming that they actually put a WiFi station or repeater in 1/5 of all lamp posts. Toronto is huge and frankly I can't imagine how expensive it will be to add all that hardware. Some manufacturer is about to get a sweet contract, that's for sure.
I didn't know they had guns in Canada...
You obviously did not see "Bowling for Columbine". Canada has more guns than people. The movie asked why the U.S. is more violent than Canada. The issue could not be simply be guns as Canada has more guns than people. The movie briefly explored Canadian lifestyle , media content , etc...
One would hope so, since Etobicoke is part of Toronto.
Although the article says the downtown core could be covered by fall, one would assume that the service would expand to the rest of the city as they continue to roll it out. Especially since they're excuse for this is that they plan on using it to monitor smart meters.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
I remember a friend of mine once told me how one of his friends got stuck in downtown Toronto (lives in a suburb called Brampton) so he ends up pan handling for some change to get home.
Turns out the money's so good he ends up staying an extra day and comes home with like $150! He was a teenager back and it's a lot of money for a teenager even by today's standards.
I'm not sure where you got that idea from. "Typically" implies majority. The truth is a number of homeless about equal to the mentally ill do not like shelters because they are afraid of them. (I say this from having worked at CMHA.)
Shelters aren't hotel rooms. You have 20 - 30 packed into a room (within fire limits) and you rarely get a secure locker to put your belongings in. Also, in the cases where you do, it isn't a valet. No one is there to make sure you aren't persuaded to open your locker.
The available options are quite poor. I'm not saying they need Royal York treatment here. But a better option with some high guarantees of safety will see a number going to shelters during the cold winter months. It is a measure of a society's progress when you see how cities treat their most vulnerable. Toronto does a horrible job and too many people think, 'If they just try, they'll be fine.' It is a serious problem with difficult but attainable solutions - if we want it.
How is a true statement a troll?
In Pittsburgh, PA the government has been busy tossing old women into the streets and taking their homes,
all because granny can't pay for the tripled taxes and new stadiums.
The sheriff has been busy taking more homes away from
families in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006 than back when the steel mills closed.
Explain to this 5 year old boy why armed men chasing his family out of his home is 'Just a Troll'.
He lived through it.
Now, if you tried putting one up in a subdivision, then I can see a problem as no one wants to have a 40 ft tower casting a shadow over their backyard.
There are a few condos within Toronto that have a wind based generation on the roof.
Not to mention Toronto Hydro is a member of WindShare -- the company that plunked a 1MW wind turbine about 5km from the downtown core.
Rod Taylor
...at least that is my prediction.
Two converging factors are going to be a big positive net for rural communities. At the same time Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and Singular are all rolling out high speed connectivity through EVDO (or similar) offerings, big cities are breaking into the hotspot world, and other carriers are planning rollouts via powerlines and other schemes -- some really unusual ones like airships floating around and so on.
While its true that none of these are starting in rural communities and working IN toward the cities, a side effect of the increased competition in cities is that is is (or I think it is) putting more and more pressure on the cell carriers to roll their services out to the countryside much sooner and at much lower cost than previously planned.
They (the cell carriers) are quickly going to find that their "market differentiator" is going to once again be the ubuiquity of their service compared to the city wifi clouds. If your market strength is ubiquity, you'll spend more money making sure you cover more remote places. Hence, soon we'll have at least dsl comperable speeds available on EVDO cards in much more rural locations.
Sure, I know Verizon Wireless has "plans" to cover their whole digital area with EVDO. Let me tell you that it is a SLOW plan from the perspective of those of us who live in the sticks.
FWIW, I have an EVDO card in my laptop for when I travel, and find it HUGELY useful at airports, park benches, and even hotel rooms in most major cities now. Its about comperable to DSL -- maybe a little higher latency. Upload speed is much reduced compared to download speed of course. They don't want people uploading content or streaming media -- they want you buying videos.
Still, its often more reliable and faster than a hotel network. Just not at home. At home, its about dialup speed until they get EVDO turned on out here.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln