Swindon residents bathing in free WiFi

Whenever “the man” decides to throw citizens a bone, especially a digital/tech bone, it becomes necessary to applaud and mention such an effort. WiFi has proliferated cities and towns across the world bringing *mostly* free internet to many. If you happen to be one of the fine residents of Swindon, UK, your mobile browsing should now be a lot more pleasant. A joint venture between the public taxpayer and private funders has made way for a 1,400 access point strong WiFi network blanketing Swindon and bringing free internet to more than 186,000 individuals.

Is this reason to drop your home internet provider? If you can get a strong enough signal and are ok doing everything under public scrutiny then by all means. I however am slightly hesitant to move solely to public owned internet. However, if my home DSL keeps raising in price and my fine city decides to try this little deal out themselves, I couldn’t say I would be tempted. Still, the fact that such a large city now has city-wide, free internet is definitely something worth getting excited over.

With so much land to cover and users to support, it would be interesting to know how the network is coping with said factors. Does anyone living in Swindon feel like sharing their experience in regards to performance, latency, and so on?

TechDigest > The Guardian

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