EU €120m Wi-Fi spend explained, but not excused

Jean-Claude Juncker, who would rather be popular than achieve anything serious in his time in office.

The man has a God complex, he doesn't seem to care about being popular or serious, except in his own circle of cronies.

Ever read your own articles?

Read the first few paragraphs of this article and tell me what it's about.

"extending the reach of Wi-Fi" could mean anything, to me it sounds like some research to extend the range of a single access point.

But no, apparently it's to do with adding public Wi-Fi hotspots. Yet the word "hotspot" doesn't appear until paragraph 15.

"every MuniWi-Fi project ever launched has been switched off"

Wrong. HotCity, the municipal Wi-Fi in Luxembourg (the small pond where Junker was formerly a big fish) has been going ten years and is still expanding, helped by a spurt last year when Luxembourg held the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU. Mind, if you have 4G, you'll do much better than HotCity's single-digit Mbps cap.

4G

The other day there was talk about opening up in-country network-to-network roaming to allow people to get better access to 4G.

Instead of pursuing muniWiFi could it be better to just use 4G?

To be honest, a lot of times I go to places that offer free wifi (coffee shops, burger joints, even my local town's muniWifi) and I actually ignore wifi and use 4G because the performance is better and I don't need to faff about going through 'welcome to the wifi network, please click heer to continue' web page

A speed-limited service is ideal - it provides basic connectivity for foreigners who don't have (affordable) mobile roaming, while discouraging locals from using it versus a fixed/cellular connection (thus not pissing off the local operators).

In the majority of town centres in Poland, there is exactly that service. No silly signup pages on most either. Shopping centres and airports have similar but with a landing page (just hit the obvious button if you can't understand the text) - particularly of note is that I never had to put any personal details in for any of them.

However, over here in Blighty... we have to give everything up to our inside leg measurements and/or pay extortionate amounts to use the available hotspots.

I know which system I prefer.

"Comments included musings that every MuniWi-Fi project ever launched has been switched off"

That doesn't necessarily mean they haven't achieved their goal. In the early days of WiFi and ADSL, municipal networks were in some cases the only way people could get internet access at all. As the reach of ADSL expanded and phone data bundles became more affordable, the need for a muni network ceases to exist.

"Dupuy admitted that Spain was a problem"

He doesn't know the half of it. :-(