Paris wants wireless Internet access across city
PARIS (Reuters) - Paris wants blanket wireless Internet cover by the end of 2007, helping to make it the most connected capital city in the world, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe said on Tuesday. — Under a new plan, the city hopes to set …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mayor Bertrand Delanoe's announcement puts Paris into a race that was already running: six months earlier, CNET was asking whether Wi-Fi could make it in Manhattan, framing big-city blanket wireless as an open question of economics and politics rather than technology. Delanoe's answer is to make it a municipal project, with a hard end-2007 deadline and an explicit ambition to be the most connected capital in the world.
The significance is competitive as much as technical: if a major European capital delivers citywide access as a public service, every other large city's connectivity story becomes a comparison point, and the question shifts from whether urban Wi-Fi works to who pays for it.
First-order effects
- Parisians and visitors gain free or low-cost wireless access across public spaces by end-2007, with the city — not carriers — setting coverage targets and funding the build-out.
- Delanoe converts connectivity into a visible mayoral deliverable with a fixed deadline, making Paris's progress measurable against the 'most connected capital' claim.
Second-order effects
- Paid hotspot operators and telecoms selling per-session Wi-Fi in Paris face a free municipal alternative that undercuts their pricing model in exactly the dense urban markets where they charge most.
- Other capitals and large cities come under pressure to match the pledge or explain why their residents pay for what Paris gets free, echoing the deployment questions raised in the Manhattan debate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, wireless broadband starts being treated as municipal infrastructure — planned and subsidized at city hall like lighting or transport — rather than left to carrier rollout economics, with the unresolved question being which funding model survives contact with real costs.
The trend: Major world cities are beginning to treat wireless broadband as a publicly funded municipal service, competing with each other on connectivity the way they once competed on transit or culture.