Jan 5, 2006
Wifi spreads across UK cities
City-wide wi-fi rolls out in UK via BBC News – Technology
Wireless communications company The Cloud is planning to launch wireless broadband services in nine cities across the UK this spring, including Manchester, Birmingham and London. Unfortunately though the networks will only be open to users of BT Openzone, O2, SkypeZones and Nintendo WiFi, which is a bit of a shame, although hopefully other service providers will express an interest in joining. The existing offerings are also ridiculously overpriced, most of them don’t offer unlimited plans (unlike wired broadband provided over your telephone line) and o2’s rate of £6 for 60 minutes is extortionate. It’s a real shame that wireless providers seem to want to charge so much for using their networks, because if there was a reasonable plan with unlimited usage (I refuse to pay per minute/hour, the days of dial up when you had to do that are over) that didn’t cost too much then I’d sign up without hesitation. At the moment the lack of such a scheme doesn’t bother me, because I still have access to the University of Manchester campus wireless LAN, but six months from now I won’t be able to use that and at the moment there isn’t a commercial scheme available that would provide the same service for a reasonable cost.
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