Free broadband in Dublin

BennytheBall

What do people make of this story?



http://www.thepost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqid=15750-qqqx=1.asp



Dublin set for free broadband scheme

16 July 2006 By Adrian Weckler
The new Lord Mayor of Dublin has said that funding for free city-wide broadband could be given the go-ahead by Dublin City Council later this year.

The new Lord Mayor of Dublin has said that funding for free city-wide broadband could be given the go-ahead by Dublin City Council later this year.

Vincent Jackson said that councillors could give the green light for the construction of a new city-wide wireless internet (wi-fi) network as soon as November. Several large telecoms companies have also expressed an interest in building or maintaining such a network.

‘‘Looking around the council, I think that there will be very few people saying no to this,” he said. ‘‘It’s not a lot of money. It’s a very positive thing for everybody.”

Jackson said that motions before the council, urging it to follow the lead of US cities in providing free or cheap broadband to citizens, would be beneficial for the city’s reputation.

‘‘It would be great if Dublin were to the fore of this,” he said. ‘‘It’s not a lot of money by today’s standards. If it were to result in an advantage to investing in Dublin, it must be considered. You only have to look at how much the IDA spends at the moment attracting jobs. This is not a lot of money by comparison.”

Telecoms experts put the cost of building such a network - which would serve the greater metropolitan Dublin area - at between €2 million and €4 million. Wi-fi can be picked up automatically by most laptops.

‘‘We’re no longer a low-cost economy,” said Jackson. ‘‘Research and development is the way of the future. As a city, we should be technologically advanced and a world-beater.”

Several telecoms firms said they would be interested in any public-private partnership aspect of the move.

‘‘We would be very interested in getting involved in any such project,” said a spokesman for Irish Broadband. ‘‘We think we’re probably one of the best companies to advise on such a roll-out.”

Other companies are also watching developments closely.

‘‘We would definitely be interested,” said John Quinn, director of strategy in Digiweb, a wireless broadband operator.

‘‘We have so much capacity in the air in Dublin already that feeding the high number of wifi city zones required would be easy for us to do.

‘‘If the council made all the lampposts available for the project, this would provide the space for our feeder antennas.”

When asked whether it would be interested in participating in such a public-private partnership, a spokesman for Eircom said: ‘‘That would assume that we accepted the establishment of the network in the first place.”

Capt'n Midnight

other cities have done this so technology wise it's very doable.
the budget is TINY compared to almost any other infrastructure project.

problem is getting money and the political will and how to control it - bandwidth wise and people trying to resell it.

other problem may be lack of RF spectrum - it's busy enough out there.

running a ring around the M50 should be easy enough and those lights are plenty tall - a quick start and spread out from there.


As I keep pointing out tele-commuting is far cheaper than building roads.

Politically I can see lots of the ISP's getting upset, especially eircom. Lets face it if you could get VoIP free and you already have a mobile phone you don't really need a land line

28064212

Eircom wrote:

‘‘That would assume that we accepted the establishment of the network in the first place.”

Yeah, they sound pretty pissed

philologos

would this cover Lucan do you reckon, because it says City wide and Lucan is in Dublin County

Tazz T

BennytheBall wrote:

Several telecoms firms said they would be interested in any public-private partnership aspect of the move.

‘‘We would be very interested in getting involved in any such project,” said a spokesman for Irish Broadband. ‘‘We think we’re probably one of the best companies to advise on such a roll-out.”

ROFLMAO