Free WiFi in Canada....

[karen]

http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61&sid=50881

Pilot locations
You can find AccessZone pilot sites at the following convenient locations across Canada. Visit this page regularly for updates as we add more hotspot sites.

Ontario:
Toronto: Union Station
Panorama Lounge, Union Station Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge,
Pearson International Airport, Terminal 2

Kingston: Confederation Park and Marina
St. Lawrence College

Quebec:
Montreal: Panorama Lounge, Central Station
Dorval Airport, Departures Area
Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge, Dorval Airport

Alberta:
Calgary: Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge,
Calgary International Airport

Bell is piloting 802.11b access points in Toronto, Kingston, Montreal, and Calgary, in limited locations....for free until March 2003.

Karen

[The Big Jay]

Drool worthy news.

But how _are_ they going to charge for service anyway?

[szamot]

Here is an interesting article worth reading. The wireless dream is expanding but don't take my word for it read it for yourself. Even in Edmonton it is going to be up and running and hopefully across Canada very soon.

This picture is not me, honestly I don't look this bad::
http://www.canada.com/search/story.aspx?id=e861927c-ece6-4d63-a11f-df3a80143280 - I demand a retake!

[karen]

Drool worthy news.

But how _are_ they going to charge for service anyway?

Based on past experience, Bell will use some really bad scheme to charge for this access, such as:

- $75-$145 a month for unlimited access in limited places or even have the stupidity to charge this for only one location ("Gee, Fred, we can make even more money if we make it really, really expensive and non-transportable" or "But Wilbur, we charge $79 a month for slow CDMA connectivity and this is 10 times faster, so let's charge 11 times as much for this - $850 a month. the only people who will use this are executive level people on unlimited expense accounts anyway.")

- Some outrageous per minute charge, most likely something like $3 per minute.

- Some outrageous connnection based charge, like $10 per 'connection', meaning that one will have to find a strong signal and stay put for the entire session or risk paying multiple connection fees.

- I predict they will do something really stupid like making one enter a credit card number prior to establishing a secure connection, or worse, make us buy some silly wireless connection phone card that is only sold in out of the way business offices bewteen 10 am and 2 pm, except on even days or days with a "u".

- or they will charge by bandwidth usage, making it difficult to determine just how much a session will cost.

Either way, they will most likely not price is correctly.