South Australia's StreetWise Hot Zone
Following up on yesterday’s articles about cities deploying Wi-Fi is another article about such a project in South Australia. The Australian state’s capital, Adelaide, is building a city wide Wi-Fi networks through consortium of public and private partners. Their goal isn’t to provide free Wi-Fi access but to make the city a test zone for new wireless applications and attract more high tech businesses. Residents will be offered access to the network through consortium members, but no pricing has been set. This sounds along the lines of the Helsinki Virtual Village, a similar 3G-oriented project. It will be interesting to see the economic and social results of such pervasive high bandwidth connectivity. I’m concerned that even with encouraging results it will be quite hard to sell such visionary concepts to the typical vision-lacking telecoms operators.
