MuniWireless

BT is encouraging its business customers to share their Wi-Fi connections via their BT Business Total Broadband. There are about 170,000 business customers who could offer Wi-Fi for free as a courtesy to visitors to their offices. BT says the customers could earn revenue by charging for Wi-Fi, but to make a tidy profit, a business needs a lot of people using the Wi-Fi network. Moreover, charging for Wi-Fi access could anger customers and visitors. I wonder how many BT…

The doom and gloom associated with public Wi-Fi access apparently stops at the Pacific Ocean’s edge, right by California. Hongkong isn’t weeping into the tea leaves or canceling Wi-Fi deployments for health reasons (unlike Sebastopol, California whose super healthy residents, no doubt exposed to the sun’s completely harmless rays many days a year, forced the city council to say no to Sonic.net’s plan to build a large Wi-Fi network).

Hongkong has created a program called GovWiFi, which gives free access…

Dutch police are telling people to secure their open networks after having trapped a couple of Eastern European men — in different places on different dates — sitting in cars with a laptop using someone’s Internet connection. While it’s not clear that the men were doing nothing more than checking email or looking up a Google map, the police have decided to raise alarm bells a bit more by suggesting that strangers in cars using open connections could *gasp* be…

Sascha Meinrath has posted a thoughtful piece about what makes a municipal wireless network successful. In this post, he mentions that several people take issue with the semantics itself: muni wireless, municipal wireless. That’s because a lot of people associate it either with (a) a network run by the government funded by the government or (b) a network run by a private company funded entirely by a private company (e.g. the EarthLink model). But that’s beside the point. Sascha does…