pmontra writes "The City of Venice, Italy, started to offer free Wi-Fi to residents (Google translation from the Italian source) on July 3 2009. Tourists and other visitors will pay 5 Euros a day for the service starting from September. The hot spots are connected to a ten thousand kilometer (6,250 mile) fiber optic LAN the City started deploying in the '90s. The first day of free Internet access has been celebrated with a digital treasure hunt in the channels of the lagoon city."
I'll have to remember to take my laptop the next time I'm in Venice.
I fail to see how that's a change fro mthe norm.
As not only a slashdot member, but also someone who posts first. I assume you take your laptop _everywhere_ you go, not just to Italy.
It is important to non-Italians because:
1. it shows Americans that you can get something for free, much to their utter dismay, given the tenets of their society;
2. proves to non-Italians that local authorities do have a purpose in the general path of the Wheel;
3. provides to nerds and geeks of all over the world a reasonable pretext to visit Venice, one of the magic places on the planet
That, for me, is enough.
Actually, I think there are municipalities that offer free WiFi in an area roughly the size of Venice.
Venice proper is basically a city that has been turned into a theme park. The article isn't entirely clear, but I don't think this extends to the cities surrounding the lagoon (where most of the work that isn't tourism gets done), which would be very significant.
As someone who has visited Venice, I can tell you it's very commercial and full of tourist traps.
100 Euros for a 30 min gondola ride, 400 Euros for a Venetian mask and don't even get me started on the Murrano glass.
I felt like I was in a giant Hallmark store, full of useless over hyped and expensive stuff that only women can find "Oh so romantic".
As someone who actually lives in Venice, I can tell you that you are right about the tourist traps, but they are easily avoided if you look around instead of going windows shopping. The made-in-China stuff you can buy is far from romantic, but the sheer structure of the city, with its two entangled mobility networks (one for walkers, one for boats) still amazes me after 10 years living here. Now we have three entangled networks... Yesterday I had dinner with an old pal whose job in the last months has been installing the access points and congratulated him. He confirmed the amazing level of interest even among the elder population. Today, lots of people I know are checking signal strength in every hidden corner. Looks like the municipality (and my friend) did a great job, as the coverage seems rather complete. BTW, Venice is not a theme park. People still live and work here, enjoying a lifestyle like no other, mainly due to the absense of cars. I won't tell you "come visit us", but I can confirm you don't need a pretext like free connectivity.
As opposed to $150 for a 10 minutes flight over the Hoover's Dam? You have the option not to do it.
>400 Euros for a Venetian mask and don't even get me started on the Murrano glass.
Hand made stuff, man. Not made in China.
I visited Venice in the off-season, lots of good places to eat for cheap, cheap hotel and few tourists around. Your choice to go when everyone else goes. have you tried Yellowstone in August?
You feel odors with hearing? Well, it sometimes do, with low tide and the wrong weather conditions. But it's all natural, organic, all-bio stinking stuff...
1. it shows Americans that you can get something for free, much to their utter dismay, given the tenets of their society
That's kind of a misleading statement, given the fact that you can find free wifi in pretty much any American city quite easily. I would go so far as to say that it's far easier to find free wifi in an American city than it is in a European city.
But yeah, free here in the US is usually tied to marketing (free wifi in many restaurants/bars - but you have to eat/drink in the establish
It's funny:) But to make sure that someone doesn't take you too seriously: internet in Italy is NOT translated in Italian (other than italian websites);-)
This is actually good news for all, bad news for some hotels, for which I'm glad. I don't know about Venice but last year I was in Rome (and I've had similar experiences in other cities since I spend 2 months in Italy every year) and staying at a Marriott they charged 17 euros a day for internet access. That was on top of the 400 euros a day for the s
I'm just glad I don't have to do warsailing anymore. In the past I used to tell my boat rower to keep it steady long enough to break the WPA-PSK while wearing that ridiculous mask.
I'll take my 3G phone, which costs 50c/MB roaming on '3' in italy. Good enough for email, and looking up tourist info. I expect you can get a prepaid SIM in Italy that will cover the whole country for a lot less that 5 euro/day. And if you're in Venice, there are better things to do than reading slashdot all day in some wanky tourist cafe on Piazza San Marco. God, I hope it doesn't have a Starbucks now.
I'll take my 3G phone, which costs 50c/MB roaming on '3' in italy. Good enough for email, and looking up tourist info.
I agree but there might be some reasons that can make the Wi-Fi service attractive to some people.
One is that for your 3G contract to be competitive you have stay under a 10 MB cap. That won't let you upload your vacation pictures or download large attachments for business. Nothing that matters to you, probably, but it could matter to somebody else.
Wi-Fi could also be an easier connection to setup: tourists will probably be able to register online from their home before leaving for Italy (Venice residents are registering online for the service now). That's seems a better option than looking for the right telephone shop in a foreign country and trying to communicate with personnel that maybe don't speak their language too well.
God, I hope it doesn't have a Starbucks now.
There are no Starbucks in Italy and probably there will never be. Starbucks' idea of coffee is too different from the average Italian's idea of coffee, an espresso quickly brewed and quickly consumed at the bar. Ironically, the original Starbucks was selling coffee beans and equipment and started selling coffee drinks only after a journey to Italy of its marketing manager in 1982.
... until WiFi access is as ubiquitous as mobile-network access and people pay for usage much the same as for mobile phones.
Its a bit of a moot point because protocols change all the time and will no doubt converge in the medium term. If you pay a telco for a data service it won't really matter if the service is wifi or 3G in the future.
My prediction for the next five years or so is that some businesses will stop wiring their offices for data at all. They will use the 3G cellular network with VPNs for secure communication.
Wireless is MILES behind wired in terms of speed and reliability. I mean have a look: The very latest and greatest short range wireless tech is N, which is actually still draft technically. If everything is right, you can get 100mbps of actual throughput (throughput on wireless networks is much lower than physical rate). However even that isn't as good as it sounds. That bandwidth is shared with everyone on the same access point. It is a single collision domain. Thus as the number of clients goes up, effective bandwidth goes down.
Now compare that to wired networks. Gig Ethernet is standard these days. Hard to buy a NIC that isn't gig and gig switches are little more money than 100mbps switches. Also, each and every line on the switch has dedicated bandwidth, in both directions. You can do 1gbps up, 1gbps down at the same time, and so can everyone else. You don't grab bandwidth from each other.
Of course for uplinks, there's faster stuff, 10gigE is not cheap, but not too bad for a company, and you can bond multiple wires together.
So wireless isn't going to be taking over most businesses any time soon, unless they have really low bandwidth and latency needs.
Also, all this is talking about WiFi, not 3G. 3G is slow as hell. Even new TIA-856 Rev. B, which isn't out yet only gets 4.9mbps peak per carrier and about 3 carriers per tower. So you are taking about trying to share cable modem speeds with a whole office on a contention based network. Ya THAT'LL be great.
Sorry, but this kind of thing isn't going to happen until wireless is fast enough that it isn't noticeable slower than wired, and that it doesn't cost much more. While running cable is a pain, it isn't that much of a pain and you do it once and you are done for many years. I mean even if you laid Cat-3 cable back in 1990, you are still talking about speeds as good as N (better in real usage) and waaaay better than 3G. There's no usage fees either, like 3G. Your switch will happily move data for you all day without additional charge.
Of course this doesn't even touch on all the security and configuration issues that you'd have.
I just don't see the fully wireless office coming any time soon.
I just don't see the fully wireless office coming any time soon.
It is already happening, and people are not noticing the slow speed because they are using neutered "NAS" devices instead of file servers (or quality NAS devices), so the slow wireless is not the bottleneck. As for getting out to the net, many businesses have a fairly slow or congested connection anyway so once again the slow wireless is not the bottleneck. The effects of building structure and/or the short range of antennas often mean that y
I just don't see the fully wireless office coming any time soon.
Not for big places but say you run a travel agency, or a little import operation. Many of your people need email but they can do that on their phones now. Maybe your receptionist has one of those netbooks you can buy from the phone company with 3G built in. If you don't need to transfer mass quantities of data, 3G might be enough.
In years past we had an nntp server on the LAN at work for internal forums. Now that I can get to outside forums I just don't bother. For the younger generation its just going t
I've been in plenty of offices that are 100% wireless, with a netgear in the corner serving their network. Not all companies are IT and need servers etc. and the average email/browsing/bespoke app stuff needs very little bandwidth to work well.
As far as your 3G comments go... have you been asleep or are you just American? We have cities here delivering 15mbps over 3G and even from my office I can stream a solid 6mbps. The backhauls on some of these towers have *huge* amounts of bandwidth & the slowdo
Also all wireless standard have been cracked. If I remember correctly you can send 1GB of wireless packets to Russia and they have a cluster of machines with lots of NVidia GPU's which will 'recover your key' for you in a week time for just a few 1000 dollars. On the fiber side of things you have very advanced systems that can even detect if a fiber has been cut or light deflected and resend. And fiber also can go up to 100 Gbit ethernet. I guess fiber might not be such an obvious choice your phone though,
That I have trouble believing. WPA2 uses AES encryption which as far as I can tell is still completely secure. A break in AES would have implications far beyond wireless since it is used to encrypt SSH, financial transactions, government data, and so on. WEP is badly broken, of course, and you don't need anything more than a normal CPU to handle it. I could potentially believe TKIP has a break, though I find no information on this. However AES is the most tested cryptosystem in history, and thus far is secu
That's expensive IMO. I pay £5 a month (about 6 euros)... it's capable of 7.2Mbps but you really only get about 6-6.5 at best in cities, and a lot lower out in the sticks.
Damn thing is a godsend. Wifi is too expensive - expect to pay £10 per *hour* in the average hotel, and of course doesn't work when moving.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday July 05, @01:34AM (#28584793)
...when there is talk about "free" internet there are cheers by the crowds and when there are talk about free health care the opionons are much more polarized.
Essentially it's the same thing, government and local authorities providing a "free" service. Of course it's not free, every citizen pays his share with taxes.
FYI I'm totally positive the government arranging for the basic needs of the public, such as health care, eduction, roads, but have not yet taking a stance in the internet.
Anyway, although i dont know much about italian internet i'm sure that if this becomes common practice it will affect companies that try to sell internet for living.
Well, let me be the first to say that nothing is truly "free," and this isn't "free" wireless; it's wireless that is paid for through hidden costs (taxes) that Venicians probably did not have a choice but to bear. Adding an intermediary between you and the service provider of nearly any industry can only mean higher costs, because for every intermediate step there's overhead.
For something as relatively inexpensive as providing wireless access points, the penalty is innocuous for believing you can get somet
But what about privacy? Internet-cafe's are required to make a copy of your passport when you're using their internet. How much will you be spied on when using the wifi service? I guess all packets are stored "against terrorism/child pornography/critisism on berlusconi". Guess the only way to be safe is to setup a vpn and redirect everything over it.
I've read a fair number of these 'City-X provides free internet' stories, and as far as I can tell they all have something in common... they all require everyone to to register their identity with the government and log on with a username-password.
To my ears, thats like the government setting up a free water fountain in a park and requiring people to swipe a drivers license or other ID in order to unlock the water. In fact it sounds to me like they are SPENDING who-knows-how-much EXTRA money to buy and maintain the ID scanner and weld it to the water fountain.
Is it jut me, or are there others out there thinking that free public water fountains (and free public public access WiFi points) should simply be open?
True. We have this service in most public parks of Rome too, but you need to sign in using a cellphone which is of course registered with your personal data, therefore anonimity is not possible. We have to thank for this nonsense the stupid anti-terrorism laws that our politicians enacted blindly following the example of other countries.
Unfortunately, in Italy, thanks to one of the so called laws against terrorism (in this case L155/2005 [camera.it]) whoever offers public access to Internet, be it via a wireless hotspot or an Internet cafe or any other means, must first register the customer's data by requesting a valid ID card (or passport, driver's license) and then collect and preserve usage data (but not content).
Of course criminal organizations and terrorists are using the Internet, but so are millions of law-abiding citizens. And the same crimin
Is it jut me, or are there others out there thinking that free public water fountains (and free public access WiFi points) should simply be open?
You're not required to use the free wifi; other mechanisms are still available. "Free" speech does not necessarily mean that it is zero cost, just unrestricted (especially with regard to the political domain). It also does not guarantee anonymity; free speech is public speech.
To put it a different way: why would the citizens of Venice feel that they have to subsidize your porn access with their taxes?
... because the city residents have paid - and will be paying - for the infrastructure and the service through taxes or other levied fees. It's only "free" in the sense that there's no per-minute or per-hour charges; there's still a cost for it, and the city has to pay for it all somehow. That somehow is most likely higher municipal taxes, whether higher property tax or something else. I'm not saying that's a bad thing... far from it, if it's being done efficiently. This is collectivism at its best, hop
Have to say I am sceptical of that. I spent a week in Changi Village (one of the localities in the article you linked to) a year ago. I didn't detect any wifi at all. I paid $12 SG per hour for wired internet, charged to work of course. In fact the only free wifi I know of in the region is in KL airport. But it is oversubscribed and very slow.
The free coverage is limited to built-up public areas, not islandwide (which makes sense - this is a tropical city, who goes outside to work? Hide indoors under air conditioning!). So to find the free wifi you need to trek to the nearest McDonald's or such.
Faced with a choice between the apparently miraculous (your friend is able to detect minute levels of RF) and the alternative (you know whether it is off or on and you give subtle visual clues) I will go for the latter every single time.
In Glastonbury, UK, people complained of headaches caused by a town center wireless station, but amazingly none of them were affected by their mobile phones. On the other hand, the leader of the complainers seems to be in the business of selling magic crystals that protect you from RF radiation. Strangely, where I live, in a different part of Somerset with a lot more industry and wireless networks all over the place, nobody seems to suffer.
Very cool. (Score:2)
Re:Very cool. (Score:5, Funny)
I'll have to remember to take my laptop the next time I'm in Venice.
I fail to see how that's a change fro mthe norm. As not only a slashdot member, but also someone who posts first. I assume you take your laptop _everywhere_ you go, not just to Italy.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Odd, I never bring my laptop anywhere if I can avoid it.
I hate carrying around that thing - also I find them highly annoying at a meeting, much better with pen and paper.
laptop everywhere.... (Score:2)
not just Italy
Yeah, but Venice is a City of Love [visititalytours.com]. Even when in Italy it's quite understandable if you don't take your laptop there.
Why is this important to non-Italians (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, I think there are municipalities that offer free WiFi in an area roughly the size of Venice.
Venice proper is basically a city that has been turned into a theme park. The article isn't entirely clear, but I don't think this extends to the cities surrounding the lagoon (where most of the work that isn't tourism gets done), which would be very significant.
Re: (Score:2)
"Venice, one of the magic places on the planet "
Well it was until it was overrun by millions of geeks.
Re: (Score:2)
100 Euros for a 30 min gondola ride, 400 Euros for a Venetian mask and don't even get me started on the Murrano glass.
I felt like I was in a giant Hallmark store, full of useless over hyped and expensive stuff that only women can find "Oh so romantic".
Re:Why is this important to non-Italians (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who actually lives in Venice, I can tell you that you are right about the tourist traps, but they are easily avoided if you look around instead of going windows shopping. The made-in-China stuff you can buy is far from romantic, but the sheer structure of the city, with its two entangled mobility networks (one for walkers, one for boats) still amazes me after 10 years living here. Now we have three entangled networks...
Yesterday I had dinner with an old pal whose job in the last months has been installing the access points and congratulated him. He confirmed the amazing level of interest even among the elder population. Today, lots of people I know are checking signal strength in every hidden corner. Looks like the municipality (and my friend) did a great job, as the coverage seems rather complete.
BTW, Venice is not a theme park. People still live and work here, enjoying a lifestyle like no other, mainly due to the absense of cars. I won't tell you "come visit us", but I can confirm you don't need a pretext like free connectivity.
Parent
Re:Why is this important to non-Italians (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to $150 for a 10 minutes flight over the Hoover's Dam? You have the option not to do it.
>400 Euros for a Venetian mask and don't even get me started on the Murrano glass.
Hand made stuff, man. Not made in China.
I visited Venice in the off-season, lots of good places to eat for cheap, cheap hotel and few tourists around. Your choice to go when everyone else goes. have you tried Yellowstone in August?
Parent
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You feel odors with hearing?
Well, it sometimes do, with low tide and the wrong weather conditions. But it's all natural, organic, all-bio stinking stuff...
Re: (Score:2)
That's kind of a misleading statement, given the fact that you can find free wifi in pretty much any American city quite easily. I would go so far as to say that it's far easier to find free wifi in an American city than it is in a European city.
But yeah, free here in the US is usually tied to marketing (free wifi in many restaurants/bars - but you have to eat/drink in the establish
Re: (Score:2)
War Sailing (Score:4, Funny)
I'm just glad I don't have to do warsailing anymore. In the past I used to tell my boat rower to keep it steady long enough to break the WPA-PSK while wearing that ridiculous mask.
Parent
Use 3G instead (Score:3, Interesting)
At 5 euro/day ?! Screw that.
I'll take my 3G phone, which costs 50c/MB roaming on '3' in italy. Good enough for email, and looking up tourist info.
I expect you can get a prepaid SIM in Italy that will cover the whole country for a lot less that 5 euro/day.
And if you're in Venice, there are better things to do than reading slashdot all day in some wanky tourist cafe on Piazza San Marco. God, I hope it doesn't have a Starbucks now.
Re:Use 3G instead (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll take my 3G phone, which costs 50c/MB roaming on '3' in italy. Good enough for email, and looking up tourist info.
I agree but there might be some reasons that can make the Wi-Fi service attractive to some people. One is that for your 3G contract to be competitive you have stay under a 10 MB cap. That won't let you upload your vacation pictures or download large attachments for business. Nothing that matters to you, probably, but it could matter to somebody else. Wi-Fi could also be an easier connection to setup: tourists will probably be able to register online from their home before leaving for Italy (Venice residents are registering online for the service now). That's seems a better option than looking for the right telephone shop in a foreign country and trying to communicate with personnel that maybe don't speak their language too well.
God, I hope it doesn't have a Starbucks now.
There are no Starbucks in Italy and probably there will never be. Starbucks' idea of coffee is too different from the average Italian's idea of coffee, an espresso quickly brewed and quickly consumed at the bar. Ironically, the original Starbucks was selling coffee beans and equipment and started selling coffee drinks only after a journey to Italy of its marketing manager in 1982.
Parent
When does the spam begin? (Score:2)
... oh wait.
Re: (Score:2)
Your sex organ sinking like your house? Cheap pill make your gondola floaty! Buy now!
How long ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
... until WiFi access is as ubiquitous as mobile-network access and people pay for usage much the same as for mobile phones.
Its a bit of a moot point because protocols change all the time and will no doubt converge in the medium term. If you pay a telco for a data service it won't really matter if the service is wifi or 3G in the future.
My prediction for the next five years or so is that some businesses will stop wiring their offices for data at all. They will use the 3G cellular network with VPNs for secure communication.
Not likely (Score:5, Informative)
Wireless is MILES behind wired in terms of speed and reliability. I mean have a look: The very latest and greatest short range wireless tech is N, which is actually still draft technically. If everything is right, you can get 100mbps of actual throughput (throughput on wireless networks is much lower than physical rate). However even that isn't as good as it sounds. That bandwidth is shared with everyone on the same access point. It is a single collision domain. Thus as the number of clients goes up, effective bandwidth goes down.
Now compare that to wired networks. Gig Ethernet is standard these days. Hard to buy a NIC that isn't gig and gig switches are little more money than 100mbps switches. Also, each and every line on the switch has dedicated bandwidth, in both directions. You can do 1gbps up, 1gbps down at the same time, and so can everyone else. You don't grab bandwidth from each other.
Of course for uplinks, there's faster stuff, 10gigE is not cheap, but not too bad for a company, and you can bond multiple wires together.
So wireless isn't going to be taking over most businesses any time soon, unless they have really low bandwidth and latency needs.
Also, all this is talking about WiFi, not 3G. 3G is slow as hell. Even new TIA-856 Rev. B, which isn't out yet only gets 4.9mbps peak per carrier and about 3 carriers per tower. So you are taking about trying to share cable modem speeds with a whole office on a contention based network. Ya THAT'LL be great.
Sorry, but this kind of thing isn't going to happen until wireless is fast enough that it isn't noticeable slower than wired, and that it doesn't cost much more. While running cable is a pain, it isn't that much of a pain and you do it once and you are done for many years. I mean even if you laid Cat-3 cable back in 1990, you are still talking about speeds as good as N (better in real usage) and waaaay better than 3G. There's no usage fees either, like 3G. Your switch will happily move data for you all day without additional charge.
Of course this doesn't even touch on all the security and configuration issues that you'd have.
I just don't see the fully wireless office coming any time soon.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It is already happening, and people are not noticing the slow speed because they are using neutered "NAS" devices instead of file servers (or quality NAS devices), so the slow wireless is not the bottleneck. As for getting out to the net, many businesses have a fairly slow or congested connection anyway so once again the slow wireless is not the bottleneck. The effects of building structure and/or the short range of antennas often mean that y
Re: (Score:2)
I just don't see the fully wireless office coming any time soon.
Not for big places but say you run a travel agency, or a little import operation. Many of your people need email but they can do that on their phones now. Maybe your receptionist has one of those netbooks you can buy from the phone company with 3G built in. If you don't need to transfer mass quantities of data, 3G might be enough.
In years past we had an nntp server on the LAN at work for internal forums. Now that I can get to outside forums I just don't bother. For the younger generation its just going t
Re: (Score:2)
Sure it will, it will be as common as the paper-less office...
Re: (Score:2)
I've been in plenty of offices that are 100% wireless, with a netgear in the corner serving their network. Not all companies are IT and need servers etc. and the average email/browsing/bespoke app stuff needs very little bandwidth to work well.
As far as your 3G comments go... have you been asleep or are you just American? We have cities here delivering 15mbps over 3G and even from my office I can stream a solid 6mbps. The backhauls on some of these towers have *huge* amounts of bandwidth & the slowdo
Re: (Score:2)
Also all wireless standard have been cracked. If I remember correctly you can send 1GB of wireless packets to Russia and they have a cluster of machines with lots of NVidia GPU's which will 'recover your key' for you in a week time for just a few 1000 dollars. On the fiber side of things you have very advanced systems that can even detect if a fiber has been cut or light deflected and resend. And fiber also can go up to 100 Gbit ethernet. I guess fiber might not be such an obvious choice your phone though,
Re: (Score:2)
That I have trouble believing. WPA2 uses AES encryption which as far as I can tell is still completely secure. A break in AES would have implications far beyond wireless since it is used to encrypt SSH, financial transactions, government data, and so on. WEP is badly broken, of course, and you don't need anything more than a normal CPU to handle it. I could potentially believe TKIP has a break, though I find no information on this. However AES is the most tested cryptosystem in history, and thus far is secu
Re: (Score:2)
That's expensive IMO. I pay £5 a month (about 6 euros)... it's capable of 7.2Mbps but you really only get about 6-6.5 at best in cities, and a lot lower out in the sticks.
Damn thing is a godsend. Wifi is too expensive - expect to pay £10 per *hour* in the average hotel, and of course doesn't work when moving.
It is interesting that... (Score:3, Interesting)
...when there is talk about "free" internet there are cheers by the crowds and when there are talk about free health care the opionons are much more polarized.
Essentially it's the same thing, government and local authorities providing a "free" service. Of course it's not free, every citizen pays his share with taxes.
FYI I'm totally positive the government arranging for the basic needs of the public, such as health care, eduction, roads, but have not yet taking a stance in the internet.
Anyway, although i dont know much about italian internet i'm sure that if this becomes common practice it will affect companies that try to sell internet for living.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well in this case it's going to be paid for by the tourists who don't know how to spoof a MAC, and the rest of us get free internet!
Though to be fair I guess you could get free health care if you know how to spoof an SSN...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's an interesting comparison:
Paying for bottled water is popular without question in areas where people already pay for perfectly safe drinking water.
Where free wi-fi is proposed, the debate is virtually always a matter of ethics, and not cost.
Free health care? FUCK THAT!!! DON'T YOU DARE RAISE MY TAXES YOU PINKO COMMIES!!!
ahem.. I mean, it often encounters far more resistance.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, let me be the first to say that nothing is truly "free," and this isn't "free" wireless; it's wireless that is paid for through hidden costs (taxes) that Venicians probably did not have a choice but to bear. Adding an intermediary between you and the service provider of nearly any industry can only mean higher costs, because for every intermediate step there's overhead.
For something as relatively inexpensive as providing wireless access points, the penalty is innocuous for believing you can get somet
Sounds nice (Score:4, Insightful)
But what about privacy? Internet-cafe's are required to make a copy of your passport when you're using their internet. How much will you be spied on when using the wifi service? I guess all packets are stored "against terrorism/child pornography/critisism on berlusconi". Guess the only way to be safe is to setup a vpn and redirect everything over it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Where is that?
In Italy. See:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/10/passport_requir.html
for more info.
With good reason (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
And when the Mexican flu hits, they don't have to leave their houses.
This event will be chronicled in the Decametweet [wikipedia.org].
Radical proposal?? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've read a fair number of these 'City-X provides free internet' stories, and as far as I can tell they all have something in common... they all require everyone to to register their identity with the government and log on with a username-password.
To my ears, thats like the government setting up a free water fountain in a park and requiring people to swipe a drivers license or other ID in order to unlock the water. In fact it sounds to me like they are SPENDING who-knows-how-much EXTRA money to buy and maintain the ID scanner and weld it to the water fountain.
Is it jut me, or are there others out there thinking that free public water fountains (and free public public access WiFi points) should simply be open?
-
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
True. We have this service in most public parks of Rome too, but you need to sign in using a cellphone which is of course registered with your personal data, therefore anonimity is not possible. We have to thank for this nonsense the stupid anti-terrorism laws that our politicians enacted blindly following the example of other countries.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Unfortunately, in Italy, thanks to one of the so called laws against terrorism (in this case L155/2005 [camera.it]) whoever offers public access to Internet, be it via a wireless hotspot or an Internet cafe or any other means, must first register the customer's data by requesting a valid ID card (or passport, driver's license) and then collect and preserve usage data (but not content).
Of course criminal organizations and terrorists are using the Internet, but so are millions of law-abiding citizens. And the same crimin
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Is it jut me, or are there others out there thinking that free public water fountains (and free public access WiFi points) should simply be open?
You're not required to use the free wifi; other mechanisms are still available. "Free" speech does not necessarily mean that it is zero cost, just unrestricted (especially with regard to the political domain). It also does not guarantee anonymity; free speech is public speech.
To put it a different way: why would the citizens of Venice feel that they have to subsidize your porn access with their taxes?
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NIce, BUT: (Score:2)
What is the bandwith? Is there a cap on the amount of data?
Because, you know, bandwith on the backbone is not free.
It's not really free as in beer... (Score:2)
... because the city residents have paid - and will be paying - for the infrastructure and the service through taxes or other levied fees. It's only "free" in the sense that there's no per-minute or per-hour charges; there's still a cost for it, and the city has to pay for it all somehow. That somehow is most likely higher municipal taxes, whether higher property tax or something else. I'm not saying that's a bad thing... far from it, if it's being done efficiently. This is collectivism at its best, hop
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I bet their tax increase is a lot less than my broadband bill.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Venice residents will soon begin renting their accounts to tourists for 3 euros/day.
Aaah La Repubblica Serenissima (Score:2)
after all, theirs was the longest lasting ever republic, lasting more than 1000 years. no surpise that some of the spirit still remains.
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Hume's principle (Score:4, Interesting)
In Glastonbury, UK, people complained of headaches caused by a town center wireless station, but amazingly none of them were affected by their mobile phones. On the other hand, the leader of the complainers seems to be in the business of selling magic crystals that protect you from RF radiation. Strangely, where I live, in a different part of Somerset with a lot more industry and wireless networks all over the place, nobody seems to suffer.
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