|
Funding a free citywide Wi-Fi network: some ideas |
|
|
|
|
Written by Kory Mohr
|
|
Monday, 25 April 2005 |
 Esme Vos of Muniwireless.com just might be on to something here. In summary, she provides ideas how to provide free wi-fi service to metropolitan areas while allowing it to pay for itself via value-added services. She also specifically mentions ISP/WISP as the basis for the proposed infrastructure.
I was sitting in a Wi-Fi cafe (Lulu Carpenter's) in Santa Cruz,
California this afternoon with my husband, wondering how to create a
citywide wireless broadband network that offers access free of charge
to users and pays for itself (or even makes money). Suddenly it came to
us: advertising (Google adsense plus Google Maps plus Local Search).
Assume you have a citywide Wi-Fi cloud and lots of people with
laptops and Wi-Fi enabled PDAs or phones. That's a lot of people who
can be online at any time visiting web pages, doing Google searches,
calling on Skype, etc. Without that cloud, those people would not be
online. In other words, the number of "moments" for people to do a
local search using Google Maps or a Google keyword search has just been
increased dramatically by the presence of a Wi-Fi cloud.
|
General 
Advanced Search
