wireless toronto

Toronto’s free downtown wi-fi – www.onezone.ca – has been live for about a month – but i’m only using it for the first time now. I wonder how useful this service really is – I’m sitting in Dundas Square trying to use the hotspot here, and while the weather isn’t that bad today, it’ll only be a couple of days until it is freezing so the this access point will not be useful anymore. but more importantly, i can’t actually find the hotspot – according to this map, there is coverage but there is no legend for the colour codes, so maybe i’m not sure how to read it. Regardless though, I’ve got access through www.wirelesstoronto.ca – and they seem to have pretty good coverage downtown plus other areas.

Although, I like that there is free access around – i’m not sure i like the idea of it being supplied by Toronto Hydro. Rather than incur the costs of settting the system up, i’d rather they lowered by hydro bills. The people who’ll benefit the most from the free hotspots will be the nearby vendors so either they should be paying for it (directly or from their business taxes), or perhaps even the Toronto Tourism board should be paying for this – since the main users of this service will likely either be tourists or business travelers. Internet access is prevelant enough right now, that anyone that has a laptop, pretty much is going to have access either at work or at home anyway. On the other hand, if OneZone is going to be able to provide seamless transfers between hotspots, then that would be interesting – i’ll have to check to see if that is possible – if i can ever find an initial hotspot to connect to!

In addition, I’ve been looking for information on how they are going to monitor the success of the project, but so far haven’t been able to find anything. if anyone has a link, please post it.