Paris Pushes City Wide Wireless Internet

Advertisement (Why?)

In a bid to remain internationally competitive and encourage technological advancement, the city of Paris has made plans to blanket the entire city with free wireless internet access by the end of 2007. The system would consist of 400 access points and would be setup and maintained by firms which win the contract bids that will begin in early 2007. "We will act fast and firmly... to create the most favorable conditions for Paris," Mayor Bertrand Delanoe told reporters at city hall. "It is a decisive tool for international competition and thus important for the city."

Plans do not stop there, though. Paris will also drastically cut taxes on laying fiber optic wire and license fees for maintaining such networks. The city plans to have 80% of all buildings connected to ultra high speed networks by the year 2010, further increasing their competitiveness in the digital world.

Mayor Delanoe will submit the plans for approval by the city council next week.

News source: Yahoo! News

#1 djesteban on 05 Jul 2006 - 02:34

vive la france

(2 replies) #2 sLm4ever on 05 Jul 2006 - 02:55

ummmm .... what about WiMax ? .... they wont use it aren't they = !? ...

#2.1 Cole on 05 Jul 2006 - 03:56

They should use WiMax, as they could get everyone on HSI in 10000% less time. But, from the context of the article it looks as though they are using wired technology. :-

#2.2 bangbang023 on 05 Jul 2006 - 04:56

Quote - Cole said @ #2.1

They are using WiFi. However, they aren't just focusing on that. They also wish to make sure all the in home/business wired connections are ultra high speed.

(3 replies) #3 Matt T on 05 Jul 2006 - 03:00

I wish more cities thought like Paris.

#3.1 reidtheweed01 on 05 Jul 2006 - 03:34

Their are quite a few cities that are doing this, its nothing new. Even new orleans has it.

#3.2 seta-san on 05 Jul 2006 - 08:29

heck. most small towns in nebraska has it like Valley and Fremont... Sounds like paris is running a little behind on the times.

#3.3 Jugalator on 05 Jul 2006 - 10:53

"most small towns"
"Sounds like paris is running a little behind on the times"

Valley: pop 1,788
Fremont: pop 25,174
Paris: pop 2,144,700

Sounds like you have no sense of scale and the comparatively massive undertaking when it comes to Paris.

#4 slimy on 05 Jul 2006 - 03:32

Definitely a good idea, this should be implemented in most big cities

#5 dolimite35 on 05 Jul 2006 - 03:56

My city had plans to offer free wireless across the whole city but company backed out. Free internet through ads didnt seem like a very good idea to the company setting it up... Crap

(3 replies) #6 PsykX on 05 Jul 2006 - 04:42

I don't know... Aren't wireless devices directly related to cancer or other health problems? The objective is just great, but I don't know about the consequences.

#6.1 Milk on 05 Jul 2006 - 08:12

Lol! No matter where you go today you're exposed to radiation. The chances of these networks causing cancer if anything at all is 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

#6.2 Jugalator on 05 Jul 2006 - 10:58

^ Yeah, listen to Milk above who has done research on this subject. :p

#6.3 PsykX on 05 Jul 2006 - 14:38

Yeah, show us the studies !

(2 replies) #7 Shiranui on 05 Jul 2006 - 05:00

Good news!

Last time I was in Paris, I had to cough up €60 for a week's worth of access.

#7.1 Foueddy-F on 05 Jul 2006 - 10:16

well, thats the price in hotels.

Most of the people use DSL in Paris. Very few of them use Cable. Its because DSL is so much faster and cheaper in Paris. Here's an example of one of the DSL's current offer:

24 Mbit/s Down
1 Mbit/s Up
Unlimited calls towards landlines phones in 15 countries
More than 200 TV channels with a 100 free.

All that for 30euros (= $38 US) / month

When I see that I'm so ****ed.
I pay $60 US / month for 5mbit/s and the basic TV channels. I'm on Cable using Time Warner, what a rip off!

#7.2 iascoot on 05 Jul 2006 - 10:42

Quote - Foueddy-F said @ #1.1

I pay $60 US / month for 5mbit/s and the basic TV channels. I'm on Cable using Time Warner, what a rip off!

i Pay about $37USD for 3.5mb/down and 128kb up with a 10gig cap in NZ
interleaving is turned on so get crap ping
and no extra tv channels

#8 HoochieMamma on 05 Jul 2006 - 07:38

I know it's wishful thinking, but I wish they did this here in Melbourne, Australia.

#9 DomZ on 05 Jul 2006 - 10:00

I wish the UK would pull up their socks, and start thinking about stuff like this instead of being 10 years behind everyone else.

#10 Webgraph on 05 Jul 2006 - 10:28

Jeez! Even France is behind Canada in making entire communities wireless!

Fredericton (NB) was the first to get this done a few years back and Sherbrooke (PQ) is working on this now. Also, it should be noted that Rogers and Bell Canada are working on this Inukshuk project, which aims to provide wireless to two thirds of Canadians in two to three years.

As for the free bit, I doubt that it would be. Probably will require registration with an existing ISP as in Canada.

#11 Xerxes on 05 Jul 2006 - 10:45

I wish they'd do something like that here in Australia

#12 Glassed Silver on 05 Jul 2006 - 13:54

freeeeeeee

damn i wish my city would setup something like this....
but we only got 200,000 inhabitants *sigh*...

-fm

#13 Ravensworth on 05 Jul 2006 - 15:08

How do you control something like this though; people could be using it to break laws right and left and there's no way to trace them.

#14 lbmouse on 05 Jul 2006 - 18:11

One wonders of the packet surrender^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hloss rate level at these Parisian wireless access points. *ducks*

#15 jordanspringer on 09 Jul 2006 - 19:39

My city already has full city wide free Wi-fi and its really sweet. It's a smaller city (roughly 70,000) with 60+ access points so far. You can use it for your laptops, PDAs, Nintendo DS and basically everything. Even the parking meters in our town are on Wifi, and when your parking meter expires, it sends an alert to the parking meter man's PDA to come ticket you....which probaly is the only ****ty thing about it all!

Oh yeah, if ur wondering, the city is Fredericton, NB, Canada and the Wi-Fi network is called the "Fred e-Zone". We have signs in areas indicating that the e-zone services this area blah blah blah, for locations around town.

Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!

Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.

Neowin.net