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Pioneering Wi-Fi City Sees Startup Woes
By Larry Hendrick | April 24, 2006
This article about the free WiFi the city is trying to provide has many aspects that probably need commenting on, but if you will click the link and read the whole article, I can be spared the duty to say, “I told you so.”
Except, I wonder where all these people think the $2 million original money and the $400,000+ annual money, that is estimated to run the network, comes from. Do you think any of them know?
My Way News - Pioneering Wi-Fi City Sees Startup Woes
ST. CLOUD, Fla. (AP) - Joe Lusardi’s friends back in New York couldn’t believe it when he told them he’d have free Internet access through this city’s new Wi-Fi network. It’s free all right, but residents are, to some extent, getting what they pay for.More than a month after St. Cloud launched what analysts say is the country’s first free citywide Wi-Fi network, Lusardi and others in this 28,000-person Orlando suburb are still paying to use their own Internet service providers as dead spots and weak signals keep some residents offline and force engineers to retool the free system.
“Everybody’s happy they were going to have it, but I don’t know if they’re happy right now,” said Lusardi, a 66-year-old retired New York City transit worker.
The same troubles with the small town’s big Internet project could be lessons for municipalities from Philadelphia to San Francisco considering similar networks.
Topics: Business, Technology, WiFi |