Toronto Hydro today announced that they’re deploying a wifi network. Here’s a summary of the details they’ve released:
– it will launch in 5 stages:
— phase 1: front to queen, church to spadina (end of June)
— phase 2: queen to college, church to spadina (before the end of September)
— phase 3: college to bloor, spadina to yonge
— phase 4: spadina to bathurst, front to queen (by the end of the year)
— phase 5: front to queen, church to parliament (by the end of the year)
— (a map is available on their site)
– it will offer 100% coverage in these zones
– it will be free for the first 6 months (meaning June – December, or six months from launch in each zone?)
– after that the rates will be “competitive” with Bell, Rogers and Telus, with four rate plans to choose from (competitive with their cell-based wireless Internet service rates, or their wired broadband Internet service rates?)
– the access points will be installed on lampposts
– it will offer “seamless” service, so that users don’t need to reassociate with networks as they move around
– Toronto Hydro is owned by the City of Toronto
– it’s being funded entirely by Toronto Hydro
– in the future, it will extend outside the downtown core — their goal is to “blanket” the entire city of Toronto with wifi
– it will be the largest wifi zone in Canada
The WT Blog
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I like the plan except for the six month hook it should be free to the end user.
They are only doing because they want to make them selves look good during the first 6 months the service will be up and down all the time for setup and test. And it makes sense to allow them to use since it will help the process
The pay model doesn’t work.
They are geared to the traveler. They will be no different the bell or Rogers in the end. With the added benefit that users can buy this service and use it at home and anywhere in the city.
This I suspect could be a great seller for them if they can get the price down to what the market is. It would depend on how they set it up could be like Bell they provide dialup access for your account. As long as the user doesn’t have to pay by connection.
Which I doubt will happen. my vision is to have your cake and eat it to at home you have the solid high speed connection for your network I know some only have one machine at home but in a family environment it will not be long before a network is required.
With my freeZone you want to go out take your WIFI device and you connected. Would this take away from the home market?
Yes but I believe that it wouldn’t be that great of a impact for many reasons like your couldn’t have a network hung on it they would all be connected the WIFI and I know my connection at home is faster then any WIFI system. but would love to work outdoors in restaurants with all the unsecured WIFI setups in the city now you could just about do it now.
Imagine telling the kids it a nice day go out side playing the game boy is no execuse they can play it in the park and still play with the kid from England.
The system would pay for itself, there many ways to get revenue that would allow the end user to use the network for free. The guys who use the internet to make money should pay for it after all it is the end user they want to buy their product or service.
It is a great world when you can make money for nothing.
Bottom line is unless they are preparing to offer more then just the standard Internet connection it is just not worth while in this market. To charge for it
Basic connection should be free.
Alex
I think that by FAR the most interesting aspect of this entire roll out will be whether they allow users within the wireless coverage area to form peer to peer connections. I think this is absolutely the killer app for this network… forget a file at home? Use the 54mb bi directectional network to copy it over to your laptop from your home system instead of using the the lousy upstream connections both Bell and Rogers offer to download it off your machine at home (which you technically CAN’T do anyway since “serving” anything is illegal in the TOS for both Bell and Roger AFAIK).
I think Hydro should absolutely build this in to the network as a managed service using something like Hamachi to let users create simple encrypted access lists of users they want to connect with. Charge the users who want Internet access, but otherwise let users who can connect to the wireless LAN use it at no charge.
Does anyone know if this is going to be part of the 802.16 implementation that several utility companies are looking at to save money. It’s actually a pretty interesting concept if it is linked to these projects. The wireless network will allow the companies to download informaiton about your power consumption on a daily basis, some are actually looking into sending you copies of these reports so you can mange your power consumption more effectively.
I was personally very excited when I first heard of this.
More connectivity options, the better for consumers.
Hopefully the rates wont be as much as current bell/telus data service plans (which I currently have on the UTStar 6700 phone).
I would be very interested in seeing how this plays out with VOIP service providers and the availability of dual wifi/cdma smart phones which can automatically opt to use a voip connection over wlan vs. the bell network for making a call (international or even local)
beginning of the end for big bell?
Mark H.