London Getting Citywide WiFi By Olympics
![London Getting Citywide WiFi By Olympics [Mayor Johnson Unveils "Wireless London" To Prove City Is Center Of Technological Innovation]](http://nexus404.com/Blog/thumbnailimages/alt/london-hybrid-busTFTSThumb220153.jpg)
WiMax? Who needs WiMax when you can just put a WiFi hotspot on “every lampost and bus stop” in a city. That’s what London is up to, as London mayor Boris Johnson unveiled a new project dubbed “Wireless London” at a Google Zeitgeist event. The project will cover the city of 7.5 million in a single WiFi mesh network. They hope to have it done before the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Boris Johnson, mayor of London, said at the conference:
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet, was born in London, so we claim paternity of the internet. London is the home of technological innovation. We in City Hall are doing our best to keep up. [...] Every lampost and every bus stop will one day very soon, and before the 2012 Olympics, be wi-fi enabled
The Evening Standard got a bit more info on the report, saying that it will involve thousands of WiFi hotspots installed across the city. As you can imagine, these aren’t just stock Linksys WRT56 routers, instead they’ll be custom built to withstand the elements.
The service will not be free – you’ll pay to use it, but the details haven’t been announced. 22 London boroughs have signed on to the plan. The City of London (the historical boundaries of London, now best known as the main financial district) already does something similar.
The hope is to offer WiFi for both people out in the city and to home users. However fast this WiFi internet will be remains to be seen (and likely will be bogged down by the sheer number of people in London at any rate).
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Nice image of the proposed new Routemasterbus too!! Three entrances/exits, two staircases to the upper deck, and rear engined too! The only design feature of the old (and much loved) Routemaster is the curved end of the top deck. Still, at least we might still get to hear the ‘Plenty of room on top love’ from the clippies!! Great stuff.
Glad you liked it, Mike.
I actually just used it because it was on our media server (and was a pretty general “London” picture), although I suppose it does sort of prove another point about London and technical innovations.
Our man Mike Payne did a full article on the new buses. Here’s a link – http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/05/18/london-unveils-hybrid-double-decker-bus-transport-for-londons-new-bus-achieves-a-40-boost-in-efficiency-over-diesel/
Hello Kevin – I work for Alvarion. Just for the record there are many advantages to deploying WiMAX over wifi in such a situation.
To put hotspots on every lamp post and bus stop will take months and will be very expensive –including labour costs.
You can get the same coverage from WiMAX in much less time and with less investment.
Plus a WiMAX network is more secure with guaranteed QoS even when there are a large number of users – which is not the case with wifi.
Finally, operating costs for this wifi network, with so many units to manage and maintain, will add to the costs. Just my thoughts based on visiting a whole host of cities around the world with both WiMAX and wifi networks. cheers. bridget
Thanks for the input Bridget. I must agree, WiMAX seems much more suited for such a task.