14 DAY TRIAL // Rosario, the largest city in the Santa Fe province of Argentina counting almost one billion inhabitants has recently considered setting up free Wi-Fi municipal access. Therefore MR_GRATUITA network was born, currently available only in a relatively small area of the city.
But the Government and local authorities said they will cooperate in extending this project to cover the entire city. Through the 'Cuidad Digital 2010' program, it is intended to provide free access across the entire city by 2010. Inaugurated by Miguel Lifschitz city mayor, the service currently features a 128 Kbps limited connection and it also prevents possible illegal usage by limiting the P2P feature. If you happen to be in Rosario, in order to use this network you'll have to create an account by supplying a valid e-mail address.
The Register and Sign-up also have an English version, apart from the default Spanish one, therefore you won't have to worry too much about how to complete the registering process if you're not a Spanish speaker.
The entire Wi-Fi network was developed by a group of IT specialists from the city's administration and it is based on an infrastructure developed especially on OpenSource solutions. As Federico Lazcano, one of the IT group members working on this project, said about the creation of Rosario's Wi-Fi network : "free software exclusively [has been used], from the access points to the main head-end router". " Among others the network is said to take in software such as: OpenWRT, OpenVPN, Wifidog and Debian GNU/Linux.
The idea of implementing such a network is not actually new to the Rosario people. It seems that last year the City Mayor expressed his intentions in implementing a municipal Wi-Fi mesh. There was also the US SkyPilot company, which presented last at the Expocomm a solution for a city-wide Wi-Fi mesh.