Dumbo, the impossibly hip haven conjured by David Walentas two decades ago, has become the first area of New York City where the parks and the plazas are covered by free wireless Internet access. Don’t expect it to spark a trend, though, as Adrianne Jeffries at our sister site BetaBeat reports:
We can’t imagine sitting on a bench with a laptop in this heat, but universal wifi is an encouraging trend. Broadband infrastructure is considered by some, including Fred Wilson, to be essential to making New York a tech hub, but Mayor Mike Bloomberg has dismissed city-wide wifi as too expensive and complex for the city to get involved with. One company, Towerstream, has an ambitious plan to turn on 1,000 wireless routers in June that would blanket seven miles of the city and serve as a backup for carriers supporting smartphones connected over increasingly bogged-down 3G networks. Almost universal; not free.
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