Boris, you need to get better informed try here

http://www.dailywireless.org/2008/09/22/wi-fi-use-grows/

as you can see London IS the worlds No.1 in the wireless Mobile Broadband Index doh!

its about time Manchester and its massive south manchester Airport and area got some free wireless and community corporate based Wimax and Co-Location sites.

you and your 3rd party finance houses collecting down south can take it and expand it from the fledgling WiMax company startup Manchester UK "FREEDOM4"

http://www.freedom4.com/pg.asp?p=businessDataMax

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39353041,00.htm

and make south Manchester the UKs major Hub for all the UKs future wireless innovations and tech houses into the Uks main Co-location site for massive long term growth and cash flow you might make there if you and the banks have some balls to try.

hell you or brown even have my blessing to totally demolish the massive wythenshaw areas (largest garden city in europe at one time) central manchester town planning screwed up wythenshawe civic centre and start again from scratch.

seling off school and surounding shopping centers and selling off to private housing corps for yet more houses we didnt need wasnt a good move on the labour councils docket, but demolishing the crappy 1970s civic center shopping and crap re-developments taking place right now would be a blessing in the long term, and you could slapp up brand new computer data centers and related wireless infrastructure for the long term future and good of all residents and the country as the whole, so do it and make your personal profits in manchester by building this central Uk wide HUB.

Come on Boris, hurry up and paint that elephant white so we can do some anonymous crimes.

Municipal wifi would be ace for London. Throttle it to something like a half megabit (so that people who want faster connections still have an incentive to pay for home broadband or faster wifi from commercial sources) and use the existing municipal infrastructure of bus shelters, phone boxes, street lights etc to deliver the hotspots.

I was sitting very near the middle of the city (on the junction of Cornhill and Threadneedle St), and was surprised to see only 3 wifi access points, only one of which was public (the cloud), which wasn't working.

Sure it's a built up area, but even so, that's a pretty busy part of London...

This is just what the dolies have been waiting for! Telecommute to america, keep your money in a paypal account and claim all the benefits you can from here!

I'd have thought people on here would know better than to throw around the word 'Free' like a comms co throws around 'unlimited'.

If by free you mean I as a tax payer/council tax payer should pay for it then please say so.

Municipal wifi is not going to work. It would be paid for by government, therefore it would be specced by government. That is the definition of FAIL.

"Manchester??

By Rockandrollsuicide Posted Wednesday 24th September 2008 09:28 GMT

Surely if we're going to have a national hub in response to something BJ has said we should base it in Liverpool."

not really , liverpool is not really any better than london near the bottom right edge of the county, any more than dundee al the way up there ,not forgetting that place on the right everyone forgets hmm whats it called ....... ohh yea grimsby

sure some people are going to say what about sheffield but their only good for hammering steel, AND FORGET ABOUT LEEDS, we all know why they are not suited to innovation for a long term real _central_ Uk wide HUB.build out, full of confusing tech ;)

only Manchester, and south Manchester at that, is good enough, we are on virtually a direct line of sight east of you liverpool lads and we always did share our industrial greatness and job markets with you lot,so no worrys there..

you can have some of the high income UK TV digital houses relocating in our area's put in some backup/fallover/overflow Co-Location sites etc,and get some of the banking houses back near you as it used to be when we both made Britain Great the first time around, OK ;)

and dont forget Manchester has the Wimax startup in place already, does liverpool have any wireless WiMax,Point to point high bandwidth microwave and Co-Location sites or do you any have Virgin Media cable supplying you from the south Manchester Babuley cable fibre today.

see, theres another point the core VM fibre supplying to the NW already runs from the Wythenshaw /Baguley area, at least in part so your BB is bouncing from liverpool to london, back up to south Manchester/Baguley and back over to liverpool....

its clear,south Manchester is a very good first place for my Uk wide Central WiMax related wireless hub and takes nothing away from London as they already are No1 in the world chart for the older wifi, make it happen, i dont care who does it, just do it ASAP and make your UK based money there and keep it in the country, OFCOM im looking aty ou and your international selloff of the UK analogue wireless spectrum to non UK companys.

This only really benefits people who can afford portable wifi devices. And I'm sure most of those will have access to hotspots. If anything is that urgent, it's never too far to an access point in London.

I would much rather see my taxes go towards things that will save money somehow and make a real difference to my life, e.g. better transport, better public information websites, better NHS etc.

This is yet another headline-grabbing story rather than real politics. Boris, if you're listening, please concentrate on sorting out the kids on street corners and tidying up London.

Wasn't there a BT service wherebye you sign up to allow other BT Openzone wifi users to grab a secure 256k pipe off your wifi access point (a VPN?) when they're in your area, and you in return can do the same for all other BT wifi access points that have signed up? I can't remeber the name but it was a European-wide project. All Boris has to do is force the same from all wifi suppliers in London. No need for additional kit, probably just router firmware upgrades. If BT can implement it how hard can it be?

You've got to be joking haven't you?

Unless they had 24/7 armed guards the building, the local thieving scumbags will have it away with all the hardware every five minutes.

Pirate because Wythenshaw is the only place on the planet with more bandits than the Gulf of Aden.

Tousle-haired mayor of london in shock foot-in-mouth non-shocker...

@ Matt - it was called Fon. It provides an interesting model. Doubtless most broadband providers have stuff in their t&c prohibiting sharing of the connection. However, Fon does prove that you can do it.

It could be done tomorrow via mesh networks. Just get providers to change their t&cs, get some open sauce software done and equip londoners with pringle tubes (the wifi antenna of choice). And foil balloons are useful too.

Of course, if you believe the woos, swamping london with even more electro-magnetic radiation will have terrible effects, increasing suicide, infertility and cancer. But I suppose it'll drive a lot of them out of Hampstead.

Mines the one with the tin foil hood.

But I suppose that Pompeians are too fat and consume so many drugs that they don't get out much. They don't really need wi-fi given that they are totally wired.

Muncipal wi-fi in liverpool would have to only connect to websites that are mawkishly sentimental. But then, what do those who wallow in vicarious victimhood need with the interweb?

Just remember, ping-pong's coming home. But there could be orgies of chief-killing and cannibalism.

Mines the one nicked from Tariq Aziz.

Oh, the rain falls down on a hum-drum town...

And caues attenuation problems.

Mines the one with the glove and the hand in it.

And I'll probably never see you again

I'll probably never see you again

I'll probably never see you again

Oh ...

"24/7 armed guards" - you're actually not too far off the mark there.

Wythenshawe, being the largest council estate in europe was actually the ideal location for large data centres on the 1970's, reason being in that day and age they needed a plentiful supply of typists for data entry. Some still exist today but they don't advertised the fact for obvious reasons.

I worked at one in the 1990's - razor wire, bomb proof windows, that sort of thing. The scally's did manage to nick one of the security cameras once by throwing a rope over the 40 foot tower it was on, attaching the other end to a stolen jeep and driving away. But mainly they just threw paving stones at the windows and watched them bounce off.