London Getting Citywide WiFi By Olympics [Mayor Johnson Unveils "Wireless London" To Prove City Is Center Of Technological Innovation]

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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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