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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.
I fail to see how that's a change fro mthe norm. As not only a slashdot member, but also someone who posts first. I assume you take your laptop _everywhere_ you go, not just to Italy.
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.
...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
... until WiFi access is as ubiquitous as mobile-network access and people pay for usage much the same as for mobile phones.
Its a bit of a moot point because protocols change all the time and will no doubt converge in the medium term. If you pay a telco for a data service it won't really matter if the service is wifi or 3G in the future.
My prediction for the next five years or so is that some businesses will stop wiring their offices for data at all. They will use the 3G cellular network with VPNs for secure communication.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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.
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."