In New York and other such first world cities in US there is an effort of overhauling the internet connectivity system for greater public benefit. This is insignificant till all the details about it are discussed and impacts estimated. The first thing is this is not an enterprise effort but taken from the municipalities and the supply is through Wi-Fi only, not broadband or mobile connectivity.
This is preliminary tech news for which details are still not complete.Some clues to the intention is though calculated. Why is the sudden reaction to install Wi-Fi through municipal means? The first is cost. Any private enterprise will be costly and they will only chose places where they have opportunity of growth in revenue and users. Some of the aloof places will naturally be denied their connectivity and the idea of providing connectivity for all at all places will be lost. More so this will no more remain free as one or other fee will be levied.
The next issue is why Wi-Fi? This is important since such an earlier effort failed nearly a decade ago in US only; then why taking the effort again when the wounds of failure are so recent? WI-Fi has few benefits of significance today. The introduction of new gadgets for cellular connectivity has gone through an evolution. The data usage of such devices has grown rapidly and the projected usage against the number of connections has gone for a toss. Natural that there is hardly any bandwidth left for further expansion at this moment. Wi-Fi very aptly fit the requirement of an alternative.
Teachings can be learned from the failure of previous incident of using Wi-Fi for public connectivity. At that time Wi-Fi was a very new and rigid technology. Using that for large scale enterprise was wrong, very few were experienced enough to use it in large scale commercial ventures and the failure was obvious. Today the situation is different. This is a very common but recent technology today, so that there is enough information to tackle the issues of complication that arise.
Creating this continuous cover may have some complications still. As work progress and forces people to think of alternatives for connectivity it is time that people start getting used to Wi-Fi. This may not be the best bet but in the existing financial frame work this is even a cheaper offer than cellular connection and has potential for more data and area coverage. It is still a first world effort but more and more third world countries are adopting the facilities.