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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?
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
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?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
... 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'?
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
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.
For anyone feeling anecdotal, here is a healthy dose of BS calling:
http://www.badscience.net/category/electrosensitivity/
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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."
So one nutjob discredits loads of other folks? Sorry, I believe my good friend over this guy, plus I've seen him call it correctly 100% of the time as to whether I've got my wireless on. It's a game at this point, I've tried to trick him but he's spot on every time. I imagine some folks in Venice may experience the same thing, and I can see many being unhappy about this. Pity since it's quite useful for many others.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Unfortunately, that isn't what gp poster is saying.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Calling Ben Goldacre a nutjob is ridiculous. He's a medical doctor. One that actually believes in science.
You believing in your friend is mostly harmless (except you post publicly about it). Other failures to be sufficiently skeptical and realize the benefit of the enlightenment (you are literally willing yourself to live part of your life in the dark ages) lead to fucking evil bullshit like this:
http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/matthias-rath-steal-this-chapter/
Pure fucking evil. All because people refuse to set aside mysticism.
Aside: when you turn off your router, how often does your friend also turn off his mobile phone?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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
I was referring to Coghill, not Goldacre.
And as for my friend, he leaves the phone off most of the time, unless he needs to make a call or knows someone is trying to contact him on it. He uses the landline at home and just has the cell for emergencies when he is out. This is a regular guy, he's not into religion, or conspiracy theories, or anything wacky. I highly doubt he'd believe in this if he weren't experiencing it firsthand.
But hey, I don't seem to suffer any ill effects. I don't think most folks do, so I'm at least willing to admit I might be wrong. I'm not attacking either side. Why can't you do the same?
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Because of the path of misery that mysticism has cut through human history.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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
I'm not sure why you are comparing something like this to mysticism.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Largely 3, but also some of 2:
http://www.answers.com/mysticism
Modern science holds that if you know the state of the router, you cannot be certain that you are not transmitting that state to your friend, thus to gain accurate information, you must not know the state of the router (this is what double-blind means, neither the subject nor the experimenter know if the subject is a control or not). In the face of that, insisting that you have accurately measured your friends ability to sense the RF emanating from your wireless router is vague, groundless speculation.
It could even be something as nonsensical as you, on the days you leave the router one, reading the news immediately before your friend comes over and then discussing current events with him, thus giving him a headache.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
But that seems even more mystical and less likely than the initial problem of RF signals interfering with the electrical signals in the human body.
admittedly extreme example.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
I'm raising it as a possibility (to emphasize the difficulty in accurately characterizing the situation), not insisting it is likely.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Fair enough. I just hate when people refuse to acknowledge the possibility of something just because they don't personally experience or understand it. It happens a lot with us nerdy folks and our superior intellects ;)
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20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
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
how is it free if you have to pay 5 euros a day.
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.