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.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
