The WT Blog

As the recent flurry of activity on this blog may suggest, we’ve been up to quite a bit at Wireless Toronto over the past few weeks. This month we find ourselves at our fourth anniversary and passing another significant milestone, the 20,000th registered user of Toronto’s free community wireless network.

After four years we remain passionate about the opportunities that free Wi-Fi in Toronto’s public spaces can present for community and continue to do our best to encourage its development, implementation and use.

For those of you who don’t already know, we’ve been using Twitter and our Facebook page in an attempt to communicate more effectively with interested people and users of the network – so make sure to follow us there if that’s your thing.

Below is the official press release that was sent out to mark the occasion:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wireless Toronto Celebrates 4 Years of Community Wi-Fi with 20,000th User.

TORONTO, ON June 9, 2009 – Wireless Toronto has been quietly and creatively championing free wifi in the city’s cafes, parks, and public spaces since 2005.  This month, the all-volunteer group also celebrated signing up its 20,000th user to its network of over 30 hotspots across the GTA, including the newly-upgraded Dufferin Grove Park, Yonge-Dundas Square, St. Lawrence Market, and Harbourfront Centre.    

Wireless Toronto employs a community-centred model for deploying free wifi.  Internet connections and wireless equipment are paid for by the hotspot venues, or sponsors. There’s no cost to users who want to use the network, and there are no ads on Wireless Toronto community portal pages. Users are simply asked to login each time they use a hotspot.  The community wifi model has been championed in Canada by Montreal’s Ile Sans Fil, and has been successful in several cities in Quebec, Edmonton and Vancouver.

In addition to enabling users to work, learn, and communicate, Wireless Toronto hotspots offer a unique interface linking to location-specific content, which can be an opportunity to connect with people and events in the surrounding neighbourhood.  

Or, as co-founder Gabe Sawhney says, “as much as Wireless Toronto is about wi-fi and technology, it’s also about community and public space”.  

For more information and updates about Wireless Toronto:

Website: http://wirelesstoronto.ca

Blog: http://wirelesstoronto.ca/blog/

Hotspot map: http://auth.wirelesstoronto.ca/hotspots_map.php
Twitter: http://twitter.com/WirelessToronto
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Toronto-ON/Wireless-Toronto/13780966710

Media contact:

Hilary Krupa, hilary@wirelesstoronto.ca, 647-258-1686

Dufferin Grove Park is already the largest free outdoor hotspot in Toronto, however, this weekend it got even better. A small group of Wireless Toronto volunteers spent the day digging holes, climbing ladders and installing a new mesh network in the park. The park is our first official attempt at deploying a mesh network using the open-mesh system and the result is greatly improved coverage and signal strength throughout the park.

Although we are still tweaking it a little, you can now connect to the network from almost any corner if the park, from the far north-east tip of the playing field to the southern cob structure and playground (where park staff regularly serve up great food) right down to the tree-covered Garrison Creek Hollow.

There’s always great things happening at Dufferin Grove, so make sure to get out this summer and check it out. I plan on making the park my office for the next sunny day.

You can see some pictures of the day in the gallery below. In true Wireless Toronto fashion there was climbing ladders, minor excavations, organic hotdogs, conduit piping, tiny hacksaws, good coffee, miles of ethernet cable, multiple laptops and of course, beer. A great day.

Matt Hartley wrote an impressively balanced article on free wifi in today’s Globe and Mail: Free My Wifi.  (I particularly appreciate the teaser on the front page of the Globe: “Is WiFi the future or the past?”)  The first line refers to the WT spot at Harbourfront Centre, the article quotes WT friend Catherine Middleton, and Hartley graciously gives me the last word: “An effort to make Internet access more easily and cheaply available to low-income residents of the city seems like a great initiative.  But the devil is always in the details.”

As the article mentions, Councillor Minnen-Wong is still working out the details of his plan to provide free wifi in the city’s public housing.  We haven’t spoken with him yet, but hope to soon.  His project is ambitious, and — we suspect — would be prohibitively expensive if implemented following a traditional approach to IT management.  A community approach — besides being cheaper — could have a wide range of unexpected benefits, like creating opportunities for inter-generational and -cultural collaboration.

The next Wireless Toronto volunteer meeting will be on Tuesday, April 21st, 6-8pm, at the Centre for Social Innovation, 4th floor.  (215 Spadina Ave., between Queen and Dundas)

We haven’t met in a while, so it’s a great time to come out if you’ve never been to one of our meetings.  We’ll catch everyone up on what we’ve been up to, and talk about some opportunities this spring and summer.  Lots of ways to get involved, for designers, techies, writers, community folks, etc.  Hope to see you there…!

Ivor Tossel wrote a great piece in today’s Globe, on some recent good initiatives in Toronto focusing on openness.  WT friends Mark &  Tonya Surman, Mark Kuznicki and Rob Hyndman are quoted, and WT is mentioned among other CSI tenants, Spacing Magazine and the David Suzuki Foundation.

As of this morning, free wifi is available at Alternative Grounds; one of my favourite coffee places in the city.  Drop in when you’re on Roncesvalles!

The January 2009 issue of Toronto Life has a piece on finding free wifi in Toronto, and lists ten great spots; eight of them are Wireless Toronto nodes: http://www.torontolife.com/features/access-granted/

The folks at Village Telco have an analysis of the research paper written by Wireless Toronto friends Catherine Middleton & Amelia Bryne Potter, Is it Good to Share? A Case Study of FON and Meraki Approaches to Broadband Provision.

The writer’s criticism of Middleton’s conclusion about the (perhaps inherent?) instability of ad-hoc wireless networks seems misplaced given how painfully flaky these networks appear to be.  Especially given the reference just one paragraph earlier to an incident of several Meraki networks experiencing significant outages over the holidays when many people unplugged the units in order to plug in Christmas lights.

Nevertheless, it’s great to see academic research being covered by and feeding back into the community of folks who are building the networks… thanks, Village Telco!

The City of Montreal will make an announcement in January about their investment in wifi.  Either they’ll come through on a proposal they’ve been working on for over a year with Ile Sans Fil (the very well-established local community wireless group), or they’ll try to go forward on their own, perhaps partnering with a commercial WISP.  The former option is more plausible one according to the writer of this piece (and we agree heartily):

Le réseau WiFi prendra e l’ampleur in 2009 – Canoe / Argent

Ile Sans Fil

Re: $75M from Wi-Fi sale to be used for public housing, Toronto Star, Jun 14, 2008 http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/443356

Andrew Clement

The Toronto Star’s story about the sale of Toronto Hydro Telecom (THT), by taking its cue from Mayor Miller’s spin about community housing, misses several key points. While remedying the deplorable state of Toronto’s public housing is worthy of support, the unseemly haste to divvy up the spoils obscures the missed golden opportunity that holding on to THT would represent. Part of the problem can rightly be laid at the feet of the former Tory government that both down-loaded housing to the City without adequate financing and hobbled it from properly taking advantage of its telecom asset — i.e. more on-going damage the Harris government is still wreaking on Ontario’s public institutions. Read the rest of this entry »