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Free Wi-Fi For the Residents of Venice, Italy
pmontra writes "The City of Venice, Italy, started to offer free Wi-Fi to residents (Google translation from the Italian source) on July 3 2009. Tourists and other visitors will pay 5 Euros a day for the service starting from September. The hot spots are connected to a ten thousand kilometer (6,250 mile) fiber optic LAN the City started deploying in the '90s. The first day of free Internet access has been celebrated with a digital treasure hunt in the channels of the lagoon city."
I'll have to remember to take my laptop the next time I'm in Venice.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Fail.
It is important to non-Italians because: 1. it shows Americans that you can get something for free, much to their utter dismay, given the tenets of their society; 2. proves to non-Italians that local authorities do have a purpose in the general path of the Wheel; 3. provides to nerds and geeks of all over the world a reasonable pretext to visit Venice, one of the magic places on the planet That, for me, is enough.
The Force actually is with me.
... oh wait.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... until WiFi access is as ubiquitous as mobile-network access and people pay for usage much the same as for mobile phones.
...when there is talk about "free" internet there are cheers by the crowds and when there are talk about free health care the opionons are much more polarized.
Essentially it's the same thing, government and local authorities providing a "free" service. Of course it's not free, every citizen pays his share with taxes.
FYI I'm totally positive the government arranging for the basic needs of the public, such as health care, eduction, roads, but have not yet taking a stance in the internet.
Anyway, although i dont know much about italian internet i'm sure that if this becomes common practice it will affect companies that try to sell internet for living.
But what about privacy? Internet-cafe's are required to make a copy of your passport when you're using their internet. How much will you be spied on when using the wifi service? I guess all packets are stored "against terrorism/child pornography/critisism on berlusconi". Guess the only way to be safe is to setup a vpn and redirect everything over it.
.sig: No such file or directory
Well they have to get something before their city sinks into the ocean.
Slovenian capitol city Ljubljana already has a grid of free WLAN hotpoints for everyone.
Jealous
Singapore has had free wireless coverage in major areas since 2006. I'm glad to see more cities following suit.
It's a public safety issue! The less wires the better for the next time the city floods.
I've read a fair number of these 'City-X provides free internet' stories, and as far as I can tell they all have something in common... they all require everyone to to register their identity with the government and log on with a username-password.
To my ears, thats like the government setting up a free water fountain in a park and requiring people to swipe a drivers license or other ID in order to unlock the water. In fact it sounds to me like they are SPENDING who-knows-how-much EXTRA money to buy and maintain the ID scanner and weld it to the water fountain.
Is it jut me, or are there others out there thinking that free public water fountains (and free public public access WiFi points) should simply be open?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
With WIFI area coverage all over the famous lagoon city it won't take long for services like "e-gondola", a new service dedicated to people all over the world, mostly lovers but also curious, for their chance to do a [not very] cheap trip under famous Venice bridges and channels... in total relax from their home, wherever they live.
;-)
Someone want to invest in such a good idea?
nop, nop, nop #VBLANK
I'm just glad I don't have to do warsailing anymore. In the past I used to tell my boat rower to keep it steady long enough to break the WPA-PSK while wearing that ridiculous mask.
What is the bandwith? Is there a cap on the amount of data?
Because, you know, bandwith on the backbone is not free.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Metropolitan areas are very likely to be served by 802.11n and also WIMAX, which also benefits from greater area coverage ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX#Competing_technologies )... but I definitely agree with You.. no wires in the future!
not even power line wires (not a news but, for reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer ).
nop, nop, nop #VBLANK
... because the city residents have paid - and will be paying - for the infrastructure and the service through taxes or other levied fees. It's only "free" in the sense that there's no per-minute or per-hour charges; there's still a cost for it, and the city has to pay for it all somehow. That somehow is most likely higher municipal taxes, whether higher property tax or something else. I'm not saying that's a bad thing... far from it, if it's being done efficiently. This is collectivism at its best, hopefully. It's just not truly free.
Wireless is MILES behind wired in terms of speed and reliability. I mean have a look: The very latest and greatest short range wireless tech is N, which is actually still draft technically. If everything is right, you can get 100mbps of actual throughput (throughput on wireless networks is much lower than physical rate). However even that isn't as good as it sounds. That bandwidth is shared with everyone on the same access point. It is a single collision domain. Thus as the number of clients goes up, effective bandwidth goes down.
Now compare that to wired networks. Gig Ethernet is standard these days. Hard to buy a NIC that isn't gig and gig switches are little more money than 100mbps switches. Also, each and every line on the switch has dedicated bandwidth, in both directions. You can do 1gbps up, 1gbps down at the same time, and so can everyone else. You don't grab bandwidth from each other.
Of course for uplinks, there's faster stuff, 10gigE is not cheap, but not too bad for a company, and you can bond multiple wires together.
So wireless isn't going to be taking over most businesses any time soon, unless they have really low bandwidth and latency needs.
Also, all this is talking about WiFi, not 3G. 3G is slow as hell. Even new TIA-856 Rev. B, which isn't out yet only gets 4.9mbps peak per carrier and about 3 carriers per tower. So you are taking about trying to share cable modem speeds with a whole office on a contention based network. Ya THAT'LL be great.
Sorry, but this kind of thing isn't going to happen until wireless is fast enough that it isn't noticeable slower than wired, and that it doesn't cost much more. While running cable is a pain, it isn't that much of a pain and you do it once and you are done for many years. I mean even if you laid Cat-3 cable back in 1990, you are still talking about speeds as good as N (better in real usage) and waaaay better than 3G. There's no usage fees either, like 3G. Your switch will happily move data for you all day without additional charge.
Of course this doesn't even touch on all the security and configuration issues that you'd have.
I just don't see the fully wireless office coming any time soon.
At 5 euro/day ?! Screw that.
I'll take my 3G phone, which costs 50c/MB roaming on '3' in italy. Good enough for email, and looking up tourist info.
I expect you can get a prepaid SIM in Italy that will cover the whole country for a lot less that 5 euro/day.
And if you're in Venice, there are better things to do than reading slashdot all day in some wanky tourist cafe on Piazza San Marco. God, I hope it doesn't have a Starbucks now.
Venice residents will soon begin renting their accounts to tourists for 3 euros/day.
Here I am, a tourist currently right smack in the middle of Venice. And not until I read it on Slashdot two days after the fact have I realized what the big stage on Piazza S. Marco was for.
What do you mean 'talk to people'?
1. it shows Americans that you can get something for free, much to their utter dismay, given the tenets of their society;
Free? How wonderful! So the workers installing and maintaining the equipment will all donate their time! And all the equipment will be given to Venice for free also! And in the future, all the equipment needing replacement due to age or damage will also be free! And the Chinese and other Asian manufacturers will send all this equipment to Venice for free! They must really love Italy!
It must be heaven there where Economics 101 doesn't apply, everything is free and no one has to pay for anything.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Personally, I think it's pretty neat... But I know a few people with electrosensitivity that have problems if they are around an emitted signal like that for any length of time. Driving past Internet cafés or coming by my house for a few minutes is no big deal, but if it were there 24/7, some people may not even be able to live there.
I guess there should be some compromise--yes, people want there to be Internet everywhere, not just designated hot-spots, but there's this other side of the coin too.
Before anybody calls BS, I was skeptical of RF sensitivity too, but I've looked into it and it seems to be real for some folks. Plus, I can hide my wireless router somewhere where you can't see the lights, and my friend can tell me whether it's on or not just from being in the house for a few minutes. It's actually kind of cool, except for the part where he gets a headache after about an hour if I don't turn it off. Weird.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
after all, theirs was the longest lasting ever republic, lasting more than 1000 years. no surpise that some of the spirit still remains.
Read radical news here
10 megametre of glassfibre is not a LAN. Can we get some competence in stories here, people?
not just Italy
Yeah, but Venice is a City of Love. Even when in Italy it's quite understandable if you don't take your laptop there.
In Glastonbury, UK, people complained of headaches caused by a town center wireless station, but amazingly none of them were affected by their mobile phones. On the other hand, the leader of the complainers seems to be in the business of selling magic crystals that protect you from RF radiation. Strangely, where I live, in a different part of Somerset with a lot more industry and wireless networks all over the place, nobody seems to suffer.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I suspect that one of the reasons the Italian government did this was to make Venice a little bit more attractive as a place to live.
Venice is an amazing place, full of history. It's also an expensive place, as it is somewhat disconnected (no cars or trucks for hauling stuff, just boats and hand carts) and the glorious old houses are somewhat crumbling. I read that the Italian government is worried about a trend where wealthy foreigners buy apartments or houses in Venice; they don't want Venice to become primarily a theme park for the wealthy, they would rather have Italians living there. IIRC if you are Italian and you move to Venice, you can get a stipend from the Italian government to help defray your living expenses.
This is clever. Venice is small enough to be carpeted wall-to-wall with good wireless signal, and it shouldn't have cost too much. It's a simple thing that wasn't hard to do that will make Venice much more interesting as a place to live.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It's a MAN, however that is indistinguishable from a LAN for all intents and purposes on the user end. However, I also think things stopped being LANs when they went wireless.
Meh
Oh, so because you're too stupid to know the difference, we should all call it the same thing.
I'm glad doctors don't listen to this sort of ignorance, otherwise everone would die from the cold.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Free, eh? So no taxes or anything are involved, huh?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
"Our city is sinking into the sea, what can we do to stop this development?"
"... I know, free wireless!"
how is it free if you have to pay 5 euros a day.
Dagoweb
Skype, at least, for iPhone and iPod Touch works (only) on WiFi, and works very well. Compared to the poor AT&T coverage in many parts of downtown Atlanta, WiFi coverage could really cover the extra bases... provided one was not moving at high speeds.