Massive municipal Wi-Fi project for Mexico City

The Mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, has just announced that the entire city will be one free, wireless Internet hotspot by 2008. With a population of over 25 million people, it’s one of the world’s largest cities, though this project may initially only cover the central district with its smaller population of 9 million.

The project "will accelerate the technological development of the city," Ebrard said after signing a contract with the Chinese telecoms and networking giant ZTE.

Using buses to get rural areas online

At the other end of the bandwidth spectrum, rural villagers in India, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Paraguay with no landline connection to the web are getting online using a fleet of wi-fi equipped buses and motorcycles. The vehicles do the rounds, visiting each village several times a day, and connect with the local village computer(s) via an antenna.

It’s not real live internet – essentially the vehicles update their web databases in the city before going back out to share the updates with the villagers – but it brings them those aspects of the web that really matter. Villagers can request specific content, which is available on the next visit, a sort of time-shifted web surfing.


The founder of the United Villages initiative Amir Hassan told BBC News that in addition to delivering and collecting e-mails from the villages, the buses satisfy limited online interests, at least for now. "They want to know the cricket scores, they want to see the new Aishwarya Rai photos, and they want to hear a sample of the latest Bollywood tunes."

The system also enables e-commerce for products like fertiliser, pesticides, books and medicine. The wi-fi bus is used not only to facilitate the order, but to deliver the products.