June 26, 2006
THE FUTURE, OR NOT, OR CITY-WIDE WI-FI


When municipal officials first began talking about building a city-wide wireless internet access network, I was skeptical. I still am, for reasons clearly outlined in today's New York Times, in "What if They Built an Urban Wireless Network and Hardly Anyone Used It?" by Ken Belson, who takes a look at what's happened in Taipei.


Pull quote:


Despite WiFly's ubiquity -- with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population -- just 40,000 of Taipei's 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year, but it has lowered that target to 200,000.


I'll bet they don't make it.

0 comments :

Post a Comment