EU wins approval to waste €120m on pitiful public Wi-Fi A group of European governing institutions has approved a programme to invest €120m (£105m, $134.7m) in public Wi-Fi hotspots in over 6,000 municipalities in all European Union member states by 2020. The WiFi4EU initiative, first proposed last September, is a stern disregard for recent history – which has seen the closure of …
Oh, they'll be wanting us to continue paying for this after we've left, as part of the €100bn extortion divorce demand, but not give us the shiny WiFi hotspot. And can anyone work out how on earth you can come up with a 3 year running cost of €20,000 per hotspot, even if you were using the most expensive 4G contract a back-haul? I guess I'm just not able to imagine the levels of corruption involved when such EU funding is up for grabs.
Wi-Fi efforts such as this, with Spain being a key problem area.
In Spain and Italy there is passable city-wide wifi in most resorts and a lot of the more "tourist-oriented" cities In fact, most of the install base dates from 7+ years back. It is also past its prime - 4G and lack of roaming fees are killing it.
It is the companies which run these which are opposing municipal WiFi, not the mobile telcos. Nothing surprising here too.
Sorry, but Telefonica's been opposing them for years and they've got the regulator in their pocket.
At the moment the WiFi must be in public areas, not strong enough to be usable in nearby private buildings, run at less than 256Kbps. The town council must be registered as a teleco and pay taxes.
Re: which speaks volumes about how the latest initiative is just a drop in the ocean, and how Homespots are the right way to go.
...
The major difference between a homespot and a hotspot is that hotspots are planned and spaced for maximum effectiveness and tend to be outdoors.
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WiFi4EU is targeted primarily at public parks and squares, hospitals and libraries
Clearly the author didn't engage brain here; Homespots are not the right way to go if you want access at public parks and squares, hospitals and libraries...
In the small village I grew up in, I guess they'd put the AP in the single phone box serving the village. So patrons of the pub, and those at the bus stop could avail themselves. I assume the pub would offer WiFi anyway (I moved before we knew what the Internet was, but I presume it has now),.,... so just the bus stop then. But not on Sundays, as there were no busses on Sundays. Although I guess that means the bus stop would be available all day.
"In the small village I grew up in, I guess they'd put the AP in the single phone box serving the village. So patrons of the pub, and those at the bus stop could avail relieve themselves."
FTFY
So, IP65 required, I guess.
Not only that, they want Femto cells that run on YOUR broadband, doing LTE on the WiFi bands, so that:
1) They won't have to pay for a licence
2) Get naive users to use up their Mobile allowance when they could be using WiFi.
In "corporate" / hotel space it's sold as the idea of not having to manage public WiFi for visitors.
An increasing issue with any WiFi not your own is the Man-in-the-middle attack. How would you even be sure it's a Municipal WiFi spot?
The motive is laudable. However "outdoor" WiFi is of dubious scalability and value. More money for real libraries would be good. Loads of villages and small towns have no libraries. They can have WiFi in a library. More real use than one at the clock tower!
Also you CAN'T look everything up on the internet. What libraries that are here emphasize fiction too much and dispose of reference books because they are too old.
Journals are paywalled. Decent reference books are still better value on paper too, as the big publishers only give a tiny discount on hardback and eBook versions of reference material is often unusable even on a laptop, never mind an eBook eInk eReader (great for novels, useless for anything else).
Filling Libraries with Fiction, DVDs, eBook lending, CDs etc is now pointless. Lets make them be community reference and learning centres. I've been using Internet since 1987 and Web since 1994. I don't see it replacing proper library based reference works anytime soon. Except programming and programming language material (where books can cost €25 to €75 and be out of date) and electronics datasheets. For much other reference material the Internet seems poor. Wikipedia forbids "how to" and "Original Research", it's only good as a starting point.
although it sound handy for tourists, visitors etc (but would any Reg reader advocate trusting any SSID such as "EU free public wifi"?) but surely it would be sensible to first use public money to sort out normal broadband for the harder to reach premises?
Yes, they do.
The local National Governments have to do it and get scheme approved. Nearly impossible as incumbents such as BT and Eir "pretend" coverage and Mobile operators oppose it. It has to be proved to not compete with existing services.
The real problem is not the EU, but regulators that would rather promote mobile (licenses AND annual revenue from all existing Telcos/mobile based on market share). Governments would rather spend money on more "vote friendly" issues. They think no votes in Fibre to the home. (For above 3Mbps it's cheaper than copper for rural).
Telecom Regulators are cash cows for the Treasury. Totally captured by the industry.
In a lot of rural municipalities around the EU it is impossible for a lot of people to get anything above 56k dial up. Especially in mountainous areas.
If anything I think the amount of investment here is too low as bringing wifi to certain remote spots would be impossible without long range radio uplinks.
I used to rent a house in the Pyrenees for my parents and the internet connectivity was appalling. I actually went as far as speaking to a lot of the locals about the possibility of setting up a radio mesh network to bring broadband to various villages but I was stymied by tons of bullshit radio regulation and the fact that even with all the locals throwing money in, it was far too expensive.
Its a tragic situation. There was a 101 year old lady in one of the villages who hadb't seen her grandkids in over a decade because her family couldn't afford to travel to the village to see her. Something as simple as a Skype call could have made a huge difference to her life.
She could only ever speak to them on the phone and wait for pictures in the mail. This was 10 years ago, so she probably died never being able to simply Skype her grand kids.
It probably took a lot longer than necessary for her family to find out the news of her death.
Any effort to extend the reach of internet connectivity should be welcomed, now matter how ill conceived.
It isn't even technically difficult to do it anymore. Its just money and regulation in the way.
Shebwas 101 but solid as a rock. Old French women are like old weathered boots.
Generally in French rural towns and villages the distance to the centre isn't more than a 10 minute toddle. Most of the locals tend to gather in the centres most evenings to sit around and chill out. Especially in Summer.
I was blown away at my parents village. My old man is an old school Manc / Yorkshireman so his philosophy is to muck in where possible. In a French village this is highly respected. Because of all the effort he put in helping locals out with stuff he was living like a Lord. He only came back to Blighty because he developed heart problems. He's wanted to go back ever since. Alas, I can't afford it anymore. Dumping him and mum in a French village to see their lives out would be cheaper than keeping them in the UK and paying for UK care (which is shit) and would afford them a better quality of life. They'd have a whole community tontake care of them rather than some underpaid stranger that pops in twice a week.
Id imagine its similar all over Europe.
This is why us Brits don't fit in with the rest of Europe. We"re miserable, cave dwelling trolls that don't even bother to get to know our own neighbours most of the time. We're the arseholes doing it wrong, not the Europeans.
At £120M?
It's loose change. About £1.2M on average per EU country per year.
It's a gesture.
If it was going to ONE company for something in one town you might call it Pork Barrel politics, depending on the circumstances.
Though tt is pretty pointless.
Fibre to home in Rural is about £200 to £1000 depending on volume and difficulty. Fibre can go on overhead electric or phone poles, up water mains, up sewage pipes, up gas mains, or be cheaply buried in a ditch by machine. It can be strung on grid cables without turning off the power.
There is nowhere that fibre can't be delivered today, more cheaply than copper phone or mains electricity in 1950s (In 1948 about 1/5th UK still had no mains electricity!).
Mobile and WiFi needs fibre today anyway to get the advertised peak speeds. Clue in name. Mobile should NEVER be promoted as "Broadband" but as MOBILE internet. Mobile might be on average 2 to 4 times faster in some areas if the "static" users had real broadband. The truly mobile users and especially voice call users are subsidizing "Mobile" data for the static users.
It's more gesture politics than pork barrel. The EU telecoms roaming stuff is popular. And also most people are aware that it's an EU initiative. Putting nice flags on infrastructure paid for by the EU is another way of advertising how good it is. But normally EU stories are stuff put about by the governments about why they have to bring in some new unpopular law (or ban something popular) because of EU regs. Even if those governments voted in favour, they can hope nobody noticed...
So Juncker (the Commission President) is looking for a few popular things that people might notice. In this case though, there'll probably be so few hotspots that people won't ever come across them.
I'm sure he'd like to do pork-barrel politics to buy votes, but there isn't the available budget, and the member states won't vote for any more. With Brexit, the budget will end up going down, meaning the EU will be able to do even fewer popoular things.
Of course you might well argue that the Common Agricultural Policy is quite literally pork barrel politics, but that's been in place for decades now, and only benefits a tiny number of people. So probably won't make a huge difference.
Re: It's more gesture politics than pork barrel.
From other EU initiatives, I suspect it is more seed funding to encourage municipalities to deploy public space WiFi. Expect in a few years the EU to start turning the handle and make it a requirement for municipalities to provide free public access points, so free access to online public services is available.
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