Taiwan To Go Completely WiFi?
from the hmmm dept
While there's lots of talk this morning about a somewhat offhand statement by San Francisco's mayor yesterday that he wanted to give free WiFi to everyone in the city, it looks like Taiwan is going a step further in trying to cover the entire island in WiFi. The article is not at all clear on the details of this project. They don't even say if it's really WiFi, but repeatedly say that it will mix WLAN (which usually means WiFi) with cellular. We've said before, WiFi really is not the best technology for wide-area coverage. While it can work, and it has the advantage of users already having the equipment to connect, it runs into problems, and it's going to seem awfully obsolete as a wide area technology pretty quickly. In Taiwan, though, the focus seems on dual mode handsets, which again seems strange. Handsets are good for talking, so unless the plan is for voice over WiFi (which it doesn't appear to be) it's unclear why you would want to focus so much on handsets. While it will allow for faster data to the handsets, it's really not clear why you'd want battery hogging WiFi chips installed for that when the cellular providers will have much better broadband speeds themselves fairly soon.
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