MuniWireless

Argyroupoli, Greece (pop. 33,000) has rolled out a municipal wireless network called Arnet. The city is in the southern part of the greater Athens metropolitan area. Residents and visitors can expect up to 2 Mbps downstream and upstream speeds. With 67 wireless mesh nodes from Tropos, the network covers 85% of the city. Municipal funds have been used to build the network. The systems integrator for the project is Simple Waves Innovations, a network integrator in Greece. They designed and…

The European Commission has praised the steps being taken by French regulator, ARCEP (Autorité de Régulation des Communications Electroniques et des Postes), to stop the great European mobile phone rip-off. ARCEP wants to lower the wholesale rates charged by French mobile operators to the costs of an efficient operator. ARCEP says it wants to eliminate price distortions between phone operators in France and to lower the prices that people pay for mobile phone calls.

Viviane Reding, European Commissioner, says:

“I strongly welcome…

News reporters complaining that they had to fork over $50 per day for wireless Internet access at the Hilton Chicago ballroom to cover Obama’s press conferences, should be thankful instead, according to some reports. The regular “conference” fee is $600 per day ($125 per hour). Guests, however, pay only $14.95 per day. Those who came with devices that use a cellular network for connectivity were indeed very fortunate.

Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, has just released a detailed report on the availability, take-up and use of communications services among seven countries (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada and Japan) and where data are available, European countries (Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland). They also analyzed the development of communications markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China. There are too many interesting points in this report, which you should download and read, but there are several…

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has forced Apple to cancel an ad which it found misleading. According to the ASA, the ad boasted that the iPhone was “really fast” and showed Internet pages loading in under a second. People complained that this was very far from the truth. In its defense, Apple says that the claims were relative not absolute.

The controversy over download and upload speeds on the iPhone and similar devices that rely on cellular networks to carry…