So who sees whole cities being wi-fi in the future? Just curious. One of those things where I just want to see where you all think the technological progression will end up.
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I challenge you to find a public, indoor location within 3 miles of a major city center in the United States from which a Wi-Fi hotspot is not visible. It's not an easy thing to do.
Wi-Fi is almost everywhere right now. Free Wi-Fi available city wide is likely never to happen, but there are enough access points deployed across major cities to effectively say they're already here.
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actually if you look at riverside, ca (my hometown) its the first city-wide wifi project you can connect easily anywhere in the city! The only good service is downtown generally though. Theres no passwords no difficulty signing on but the connection sometimes doesnt work so you have to try to access a few times. The building penetration is very little and you usally have to be stationary to connect (i tried while i was in a moving vehicle and it was having issues as well). The project is the first of its kind from what i understand its called, "smart riverside"
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That's cool! So is it something provided by the city? As in paid for by them? Or is it a private venture?
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Actually, that's not true. You're not the first city to have free WiFi. That would be Mountain View, California. HQ for Google and they have been providing free WiFi to Mountain View long before Riverside even decided to rip off the idea from them.
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I don't know how long ago Riverside, CA started this project and maybe they can lay claim to it being the first of its kind but here in Philadelphia, PA we had a city wide wi-fi network built out years ago by earthlink (that name alone should let you know how long ago it was) unfortunately its really horrible.
A.I.
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It is just interesting to really think about how things could go. I mean maybe eventually there will be city wide wi-fi that is paid for in turn by tax dollars or something of that nature. With the way technology is coming to rely on an internet connection of some kind it's hard to tell.
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Access points don't matter if if they are secured.
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That's the only one I can think of that alegedly offers city-wide wi-fi.
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Nope, Mountain View, CA has been doing so for a couple years thanks to Google's HQ being there.
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Calm down lol No one is going to steal Mountain View's claim to fame.
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I heard Moutain View, Calif. offers free WiFi. 😈
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No! Mountain Veiw California had it...wait, has someone already said that? 👀
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Actually, the most interesting aspect is that Verizon is hedging their bets on its near-term-future network performance.
After years of beating its own chest and badmouthing every other carrier's network (especially recalling Verizon's attack ads on ATT's network a year or two ago), it is very telling that even the might Verizon is now saying it must "offload data traffic" in order to keep its network performance reasonable.
Running a bit scared now, Ivan?
I give Verizon credit for its strong network, they have made that a priority and they deserve the good reputation they have to date, but it is obvious that with the massive growth rate in smartphones, and in particular since VZ got the iPhone, they, too, are realizing maybe it's n...
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I don't think the iPhone has anything to do with it. I do think that it has to do with the fact that VZW's new push is smartphones. They want everyone to convert from feature phones to smart phones, and in prep for that, why not off-load some network traffic onto wifi? AT&T has already been training their smartphone users to do that. Additionally, there will be a lot more data used on a 4G network than a 3G network.
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