Ottawa: Free WIFI for EVERYONE!!!

That should be the title of this blog entry, but, more appropriately, I have changed the title to “No WIFI for you!”.

Ottawa has three ingredients that should make it prime for free wifi city-wide:

  1.  A mayor who talks about creating a “sophisticated, web-savvy city”
  2. ogWIFI, a non-profit group that will support free WIFI in Ottawa – Gatineau for only $50/year
  3. National Capital Freenet, another NPO that offers very low-cost internet

We have political willingness, nearly free support, and low-cost supplier, and yet, we have almost 7 free locations in Ottawa.  Check out Ottawa compared to Montreal:

Ottawa Montreal
Ottawa Free Wifi locations Montreal free wifi locations

 

Isn’t free WIFI in our nation’s capital important?  Wasn’t this town once referred to as “silicon valley of the north”?  How can we talk such a good game about innovation and web2.0 when we aren’t making the rather meager investment in the fundamentals?

What can we do to organize ourselves and build a connected community?

By Scott Annan

4 Responses to “Ottawa: Free WIFI for EVERYONE!!!”

  1. Peter Childs  on November 14th, 2007

    If you’re commint ot BarCampOttawa4 you can contribute to the Lunch time Challenge – which is almost the same as your question “how do we make Ottawa better for Small Tech Companies”

    My suggestion – like yours – is to organize.

  2. Jean-Pierre Fiset  on November 14th, 2007

    If you feel like getting together with some members of ogWifi, you can come to an informal meeting, on Monday Nov. 19th. More details following this: http://www.zvents.com/ottawa-on/events/show/80803913-ogwifi-meeting