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Boris Johnson promises WiFi for London

Mayor of London Boris Johnson has promised full WiFi coverage of London in time for the 2012 Olympic games. It would be ironic if the Olympic Games WiFi coverage was shut down because someone had been caught indulging in online copyright infringement. As Mayor will he be the one having to turn up in court?

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

7 replies on “Boris Johnson promises WiFi for London”

guess he would… but with a bit of luck the whole sorry bill will get chucked out soon and done properly by a team who understands the issues.

Westminster started rolling theirs out five years ago with promises of it being open to the public but if it is now I can’t find any mention of it. What chance then rolling it out London-wide in the two years before the East London Olympics begin?

And note he didn’t use the word ‘free’. A day of PAYG 3G on O2 is £2, considerably less than an hour on most commercial PAYG WiFi networks.

@JJ – Have you tried network scanning with a decent Linux/Unix laptop in Westminster ? Don’t use Windows due to its nymphomaniac-like approach to Wi-Fi (supposedly it will hook up with any node it can find and then YOU may be screwed).

I do it here in California with some surprising results. Orientation and altitude can have a big impact on signal strength as well as your choice of distro (Mepis 7 beats PC-BSD 1.5, openSUSE 10.3, Fedora 9 – that’s my current test mix).

Just remember – SCAN ONLY. An unsecured port may be tempting, but using it could easily turn into a dive into hot water if you aren’t authorized.

P.S. A Google search on [ westminster city “wi-fi” network ] yielded :
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/networking/2005/11/25/westminster-council-widens-wi-fi-network-39238439/
http://news.cnet.co.uk/networking/0,39029686,49285646,00.htm
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/news/bt-launches-westminster-wi-fi-information-and-ticket-booking-service-503.html
. Another article that was in Google’s cache mentioned the iPass service [ http://connect.ipass.com/index.html ]. The network may have stalled after the initial roll-out. Happy surfing …

Thanks Ted. Just occurred to me I haven’t heard the term warchalking for a while. I expect it is because so many people havemobile devices with wifi these days that it is quick and easy for everyone to do their own scan as they walk.

Google Street View did of course hit the headlines for having preserved wifi hotspot availability as the van drove down a street. It would be interesting to see a google map of a town’s hotspots. Of course there are almost certain to be objectors:-)

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