Wednesday, November 30, 2005
New Orleans to get free city-wide WiFi
New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin has announced an unprecedented project wherein the entire city will be blanketed by free WiFi within a year. Due to the almost complete devastation of the city’s infrastructure, the free Internet access is one attempt to turn the city’s stagnant economy into one of growth and independence. Like in most large-scale networks, the New Orleans routers will be placed on top of street lights and provide citizens and businesses with 512 kbps download speeds until the city’s state of emergency has been lifted. In accordance with state laws that restrict government-owned Internet providers, speeds will drop to a paltry 128 kbps once the city has returned to some level of normalcy.
but there's a but:
Most of the equipment was donated by three companies: Intel Corp., Tropos Networks and Pronto Networks.
The system will operate at 512 kilobytes per second as long as the city remains under a state of emergency.
That will be slowed once the state of emergency is over _ that date has not been determined _ to 128 kps in accordance with state law, which restricts government-owned Internet service.
source
tarted by ---gallizio
in the world wi-freed-web era
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