When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go... Downtown!
So I looked at the Hebdo for this weekend, and what did it say?
Free downtown Wi-Fi is now available in Trois-Rivières. As of now, outdoor areas like the Parc Portuaire, the Ursulines park, Champlain Park, and Rue des Forges have free open Wi-Fi, thanks to the wonderful folks at the relatively unknown telco, Xittel.
According to the Hebdo, this would make Trois-Rivières the first city in the Mauricie region with free downtown Wi-Fi. I happened to think that Shawinigan was first, as their project was announced in May of last year, but either they're uninformed or Shawinigan is slow at deploying their network.
What does this mean?
- Keryx, a local ISP doing solely wireless Internet in three different areas is going to suffer significantly (in downtown). They were charging people around $15 a month for 500MB transfer on their vast wireless network downtown. This is essentially the same for free. At least the city hasn't said anything about attacking the Cap yet, otherwise they'd be even more pissed.
- Café Morgane's paid networks will probably suffer as well. I remember using my laptop on their network 2 years ago when it was still free, and apparently usage got so high that they decided to start charging for it. While I don't disagree with the concept of making money off Wi-Fi, I'm not going to get off the bus and go pay someone at a counter for ~5 minutes of access at the bus terminal.
- While there's still nothing to do downtown, I have less reasons to stay away from it now that it's not an Internet dead zone. (If the network has a range far enough to be accessible from the Torréfacteur, this may be the best municipal decision ever.)
- I still want the 2 to be the Wi-Fi bus. So far, the 1 and 6 lines have been Wi-Fi buses. If the pattern of "buses that go to the Cegep" still applies, the 2 line should eventually get a trial period as well. (This is where I run MobileTorrent on my iPod and use so much bandwidth that they think it's being used a lot, and then they permanently make it a Wi-Fi bus.)
- This does not change the fact that our mayor is completely oblivious to the world around him. Seemingly, the 80% satisfaction rate also seems to say that most of our city is as well.
Now we just need an accessible wireless network at school (hint hint, wink wink) and everything will be fine.
