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Is City-Wide Wi-Fi a Dead Idea?

Posted by timothy on from the sledgehammer-ready dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Remember all those projects to cover cities with Wi-Fi? The BBC wants to know what happened to them. When it comes to underground wireless data access, there are obvious issues regarding implementing a wireless infrastructure in underground stations and tunnels, but above ground the BBC suggests that it may be other advancements, such as Wimax, that have made Wi-Fi a less attractive solution. PCMag, on the other hand, suggests that public Wi-Fi isn't dead at all and will make a comeback due to the increasing popularity of Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. So, will city-wide Wi-Fi make a real comeback, or have other technologies, such as Wimax or 4G, killed the concept for good?"

5 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. I hope it is dead. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I am allergic to Wi-Fi.
    And it causes cancer.
    It probably contributes to global warming too.

  2. Dying, dying, dead. by sakdoctor · · Score: 5, Funny

    On a parallel topic, practically every home router now comes with WPA2 on by default.
    I'm surrounded by a sea of BT home hubs which are probably idle, and can't even connect.
    Outrageous.

  3. Re:59 square miles by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 2, Funny

    Goddamn. I kept waiting for that to happen when I was living there, right smack in the middle of the coverage area ... and it looks like they got it up and running just after I left.

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  4. How about a little reporting by jamesl · · Score: 2, Funny

    The BBC wants to know what happened to [city wide Wi-Fi].
    Shouldn't a news organization like the BBC do some reporting and find out? Certainly more than simply phoning up someone at BT.

  5. Re:Wifi is effectively dead by ImYourVirus · · Score: 1, Funny

    Hey its whatever your plan is say 50 bucks plus 10 bucks an additional line, and 30 bucks for data (for the iphone) per iphone as well so if you have two iphones thats 60 bucks for data, man per iphone talk about nickel and dime-ing you to death

    Ok got the basic's covered now you need to pay for an 'unlimited' text message plan, but don't worry about mms messages as they aren't supported (what a joke). Oh and you have to pay to use 'voice' dialing too, whatever that costs it was like 10 or 20 bucks.

    But hey look it's got a 'digital' compass, that makes up for everything!! /sarcasm

    --
    Why is common sense called that if it's not common?