Wireless Glasgow/ Glasgow city centre becomes Wi-Fi zone/ The Register

By Tony Smith | The Register | Published Tuesday 16th August 2005 14:16 GMT

The centre of Glasgow is now a Wi-Fi zone, the Scottish city's administrators said today.

The coverage comes courtesy of BT Openzone, which now has six hotspots in place in the city's centre, all within 50-100m of "key locations in the city's main shopping and business district", the telco claimed.

The access points are located in payphones situated in Ingram Street's Italian Centre, the north-east and north-west corners of George Square, the Ingram Street/Queens Street intersection, Sauchiehall Street and Societal Street.

The WLAN is open to the public at the usual BT Openzone access rates, but like the Wi-Fi zone put in place in London's Soho district, the network will also shortly be used by council workers to file information that would formerly have required a trip back to base. The public WLAN will host a VPN securely connecting council-issued handheld devices to the organisation's LAN.

The Council said it is considering rolling out IP-based CCTV cameras, bus shelters and even traffic lights. It also pondering plans to offer wireless Internet access in libraries and art galleries, part of its Wireless Glasgow strategy.

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Covent Garden gains Wi-Fi coverage
By Tony Smith | The Register | Published Wednesday 25th August 2004 09:52 GMT

Notebook PC or PDA-equipped visitors to London's Covent Garden will now be able to access the Internet wirelessly through Broadreach Networks' ReadyToSurf service.

Coverage comes courtesy of a co-location deal with Jubilee Hall Clubs' gymnasium sited in the heart of the old market building in the centre of the Covent Garden piazza.
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Broadreach installed a Wi-Fi access point for gym users, but its central location has the benefit of reaching out across the piazza, potentially out to the Opera House, Rock Garden café, the London Transport Museum and a wide range of other shops, bars and eateries.

Last November, Broadreach installations within the Leicester Square area created what the company claimed was the UK's first Wi-Fi 'hotzone'. Since then, public access hotzones have opened in Cardiff and Preston. Other London areas, such as Soho, are gaining Wi-Fi coverage - though in this case, it's not for public use - as are other cities, such as Bristol.

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World warms to municipal Wi-Fi
By Guy Kewney, Newswireless.net | The Register | Published Friday 25th June 2004 08:49 GMT

The birthplace of municipal Wi-Fi was possibly the London Borough of Westminster, and it appears that the idea of the wireless is catching on in cities worldwide. Indeed, some are looking at wireless Mesh technology with Taipei, Los Angeles, and New York among the more prominent.

According to Computerworld's Bob Brewin, the New York network will be a public safety project, and will be restricted to emergency services folk - but will, nonetheless, cost a terrifying billion dollars. Well, maybe half that, he reports: "Plans [are] to build a public safety wireless network of unprecedented scale and scope, including the capacity to provide tens of thousands of mobile users with the ability to send and receive data while travelings at speeds of up to 70 mph citywide."

Pilot projects are being offered for tender, and most observers - unless they are bidding for these lucrative jobs - are pretty sceptical about making it work. Wi-Fi is not designed for fast mobile use, nor do conventional Wi-Fi networks scale well into vast geographical areas.

Rather more modest, but no less unrealistic was Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou who was talking ebulliently back in January about making his Taiwanese capital "a wireless Mecca" by the end of this year. Of this enterprise, there was not a shred of evidence when the world's technology observers descended en masse back at the end of May for Computex.

The Taipei Times, endearingly referring to the Mayor as "Ma" throughout, quoted him as telling the European Chamber of Commerce in Taipei: "As of September last year, about 90 per cent of Taipei's 900,000 families have computers. More than 80 percent use the Internet. And more than 87 per cent have mobile phones."

"The next phase is to build a wireless and broadband city. We aim to finish that, or a large part of it, by the end of this year," Ma added. But, as the report noted, not everybody was impressed: "The co-chairwoman of the chamber's telecommunications committee welcomed Ma's pledge, but pointed out that the chamber has other priorities," the paper said politely.

In Los Angeles there's a 17 July deadline for bids for a request for proposal (RFP) to expand the Pershing Square Wi-Fi network to include a city-wide access system, says MuniWireless.

Rather more sensibly, in neighbouring Orange County (part of Greater Los Angeles) Fullerton wants to put together a wireless Mesh. The spec of this project, which is almost certain to miss its July 1 deadline looks incredibly like a definition of the LocustWorld Mesh in its specifications and price, but according to Richard Lander at LocustWorld, his company wasn't aware of the RFP until it was published.

"There are a lot of these municipal wireless projects," said Lander, "some of which look rather more realistic than others. We already have some Mesh systems in California, so we'll be bidding through the firms who installed them there. The Fullerton project looks ideal for us."

So, of course, does the Camberwell project, Boundless Deptford. Just to encourage people to spread the word, you might like to see what can be done at the rural village of Langtoft.

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