This is the last installment of the NYT article on Wi-Fi activities world wide. Hope it inspires some action in Mpls.
"The urban solution is far more demanding," said Alan Salisbury, a consultant at Gaia Technologies, a Welsh company that designed the network in East Manchester. "We feel it's more suitable for rural areas." Among Gaia's other projects are a network connecting three rural villages in Cumbria, in northwestern England, and a system that offers Internet access and e-mail to 300 schools in Wales. Cisco is supplying equipment to a Wi-Fi project in Somiedo, a Spanish village so isolated that it gets its primary Internet connection via satellite. It is then beamed across the town by Wi-Fi antennas. East Manchester did not face that hurdle. The challenge here was figuring out how to surmount a jagged landscape that mixes two- and three-story brick houses, towering trees and vast empty spaces where 19th-century steel mills and housing once stood. The project's manager, Bob Jonas, mounted a small forest of antennas on top of four apartment towers on each corner of East Manchester. Two of the four receive the Internet through fiber optic wire. >From there, a radio signal is beamed to schools and Internet cafes, as well as to other rooftop antennas, which act as distribution points, relaying the signal to individual houses. Though homes do not have to be in direct line of sight of an antenna to receive the signal, an unobstructed path is helpful. "It's very difficult to get a strong enough radio signal," said Mr. Jonas, who is trained as a radio engineer. Signing up enough subscribers to make the network sustainable is an even greater challenge. Manchester subsidized the sale of 3,500 computers to residents, the vast majority of whom have never owned one. But the service rollout has not been as rapid as Mr. Jonas would have liked, partly because of technical problems. Though the network has cost $2.4 million - a paltry sum by industry standards - Mr. Jonas knows that the pot of public money in Manchester is not bottomless. What gives him confidence is the palpable social effect the Internet has had on the economically downtrodden people of East Manchester. The chat groups on the EastServe Web site crackle with debates, ranging from whether Britain should adopt the euro to the proposed design of a statue that will stand in front of the new Manchester soccer stadium. Irene Johnson, a lifelong resident, said East Manchester languished through three grim decades after the steel and cotton mills shut down. "Everyone I knew signed up for the dole," she said. "It was degrading." Now, she said, a sense of community has been reborn. "You hear kids in the schoolyard talking about what they saw on the Internet," Mrs. Johnson said. "I would never have imagined it." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/31/technology/31WIFI.html?ex=1055526308&ei=1&en=b4a3634e7feab2c0 Phyllis Kahn State Rep 59B TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
