Wireless

Trouble is, it’s not all roses. The coverage is /very/ poor, they claimed most of the city center is covered, when you look at their coverage maps it is a tiny miniscule part of Norwich in mainly residential areas in the south of the city. The instructions on how to connect to their network are very vague (they don’t tell us what the essid is) and to top it all off they have spent 1.1 million on this project but only have funding to run it until April 2008, they call it a “community” project but never actually seemed to ask much of the community. My main rant is they could have just put a few hotspots in the very center of the city and perhaps the mall and the chapelfield place, perhaps at the hospital and UEA (well, at least they got the UEA covered) and at the forum. Then you could have installed free wireless at all the libraries in the county so you increase the real coverage across Norfolk. I also reckon this would have cost a lot less than 1.1 million and perhaps kept funding it for more than 2 years. Sorry, the project sounded great at first but I think overall it is a miss rather than a hit when you take into account all the downsides. (semi-rant over)

Enjoy is while you can, I guarantee this will soon peter out and disappear after the 2 year trail. Why is it we would have no idea about it if the Register hadnt picked it up? Because if people actually use it instead of buying broadband, BT and the other ISPs will pressure the council to close it. The council will concede and add more restrictions until its useless then close it to the public after the 2 years is up, keeping it just for the council themselves to use. Its a community project you see.

Its just another example of the EEDA (which has a terrible track record if you look into it) throwing some money at a badly thought out idea. Where is the obvious place to invest in a net access infrastructure? Notice the vague mumblings about a ‘plan’ to roll it out to rural areas? I bet this was entirely meant to be for providing broadband to rural areas where there is no access and no ISPs to complain. They realised that would be hard, so they pointlessly implemented it in a city with the only community partner they could get on board (the council) and where everyone can get commercial broadband very cheaply anyway. They then forget about the rural bit. Result? The council get a wireless infrastructure for free and the community get nothing. Hurray for the EEDA