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Norwich - The World's First Wi-Fi City. Technology for Free A one hour session	By Anca Rusu, Technology Editor 31st of August 2006, 13:53 GMT Adjust text size:


Imagine the world with no boundaries, with free access to everything technology has to offer� Beautiful, isn't it? Maybe we will never get there, but there is a city that offers free wi-fi for everybody - Norwich, UK. The project is an 18 month pilot backed by the East of England Development Agency and is already rolling for three weeks, requiring no less than �1.1million. "The original idea was to use it as a demonstration project - to wireless-enable a significant part of the city so we could begin to see what the benefits were in terms of economic development, benefit for the public and public services workers," Paul Adams, director of corporate resources and cultural services, told BBC News. There are more than 200 antennas all around the city, generating a wi-fi web. Moreover, every important institution has free access to the latest technology offerings such as the county hall, schools, the University and the city center. "We had 1,800 connections in the first week, more than 2,500 in the second and 3,000 in the third. It's been glitch free so far - we have had very few technical problems. The one thing we don't want to do is compete with commercial companies," Adams added. But the wi-fi project is not intended to discourage the commercial providers; therefore, the network has two speeds - 256Kbps for the public and 1Mbps for public sector workers, much slower than typical broadband speeds. From the user's point of view, all he/she has to do is to access the portal page pointed by their browser when a connection is made between a device and the network, subscribe on a portal and agree to terms and conditions. The users must limit their session to a one hour long session and then wait another hour in order to reconnect. "We are going to be fascinated to see how it grows, where it goes. As time goes on we will do more research on how people are using it and what applications are going on. We don't know what will happen when the project ends. Technology may have moved on. We don't know what the final result will be," commented Mr Adams.

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