[wsfii-discuss] Battle for Barcelona

Tue Jul 22 21:00:30 UTC 2008

Hi there,

Last month the city council of Barcelona announced their intention for 
installing free wi-fi internet access on 500 locations around the city 
using the city-owned buildings with a funding of about €4.5 million for 
deployment and 3 year maintenance. Initially those accesses are planned 
to be restricted for a certain amount of time, and installed only indoors.
Because of that, and since we already have some deployment also on the 
city, we reacted by claiming to replicate the same model we've been 
using with other municipalities of the region, where we connect those 
internet access points into an open network and release some of the 
constraints for becoming a truly open and free access also outdoors by 
meshing at the streets or roofs.
Initially from their site, was no intention for interconnecting networks 
or allowing to be extended by the civilians, they were arguing that they 
was not allowed to connect to do so by law, so first controversy is 
going around this discussion, but also on the politic opportunity for 
make this happen, and that is not used this king of cooperation with 
open networks in other countries within the EU. Not sure how this will 
end, but we can always use this experience to promote the concept of 
cooperation between civilian open networks and projects promoted by the 
administration which also uses free spectrum and provides affordable 
internet access.
As said, we have been doing this already with many smaller 
municipalities around the region, but I'm wondering if someone can also 
know from another experiences in other countries around the EU for 
having even more arguments I.e. the Spanish regulatory Agency has noted 
that the EU Commision granted to the City of Prague for a wi-fi 
deployment... we want to collect as many similar examples as we can.

In particular, we are interested in knwoing about:

    * Cities in the EU where there are some public outdoor free internet
      access (regardless if they are connected or not to open networks,
      so free as in beer also counts), with as many details of what do
      they have and where, regardless of how extense is the coverage
      (parks, some streets or squares, beaches... everything counts).
    * Cities in the EU where municipal networks are interconnected or
      extend civilian open networks (ref¡gardless of the technology).

Please, if somebody has any information on this, let us know as soon as 
possible, since here the things are advancing so quicky and we are 
having many meetings with local politicians this days.

Ramon.