unmediated: Taipei Builds It, Nobody Comes

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June 27, 2006

What if They Built an Urban Wireless Network and Hardly Anyone Used It?, asks the New York Times.

WiFly, the extensive wireless network commissioned by the city government that is the cornerstone of Taipei's ambitious plan to turn itself into an international technology hub. Access to WiFly's wireless network, built with Nortel's wireless mesh nodes, costs about $12.50 a month.

Despite WiFly's ubiquity — with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population — just 40,000 of Taipei's 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year, but it has lowered that target to 200,000.

That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other American cities that are building wireless networks of their own.
"Content is really key," said Darrell M. West, a professor of public policy at Brown University who conducted a survey of how well governments use the Internet. "It's not enough just to have the infrastructure. You have to give people a reason to use the technology."
To that end, Q-Ware has developed P-Walker, a service that will let subscribers with Sony PSP portable game machines log on to WiFly to play online games and download songs and other material.
The company has also developed a low-priced Internet phone service. The handsets cost about $200 and allow users to call other mobile phones for just over a penny a minute; calling a traditional phone costs less than half a penny.
Ultimately, Q-Ware expects its network to communicate with more devices, including MP3 players and digital cameras.

Taipei claims to be among the world’s top three cities for broadband infrastructure, with PC penetration of 88% and an 83.6% household penetration rate of Internet usage, of which 79.3% are connected to ADSL broadband.

By July 2006, wireless broadband Internet access will reach 90% coverage of the entire city through 4,200 access points, making it the world’s number one wireless networked city. Nortel has built Asia’s largest Internet Data Center in the Neihu Technology Park. This center will facilitate smooth broadband communications between Taipei and the rest of the world.

Originally posted by samc from Daily Wireless, remediated by yatta on Jun 27, 2006 at 12:17 PM