The Cloud descends over City

Free Wi-Fi for a month

By Bill Ray, 23rd April 2007

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Hotspot aggregator The Cloud has today launched complete coverage of the Square Mile, and to celebrate it is providing access free for the next month to anyone who asks.

The Cloud describes the network as "Europe's most advanced Wi-Fi network", which makes extensive use of mesh networking technology provided by BelAir Networks. It claims coverage of 95 per cent of the City of London.

What's really interesting is the involvement of Nokia in the launch - the free month is "in association with Nokia" and the two companies will be taking part in a series of events around the City to promote the utility of Wi-Fi networks.

Nokia is already alienating network operators by incorporating VoIP into handsets (though it's shown itself equally willing to remove it on demand), but this is promoting a technology which is clearly a competitor to the GSM networks that, today, pay for Nokia handsets.

It seems we're not the only ones biting the hand that feed it. ®

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Posted Tuesday 24th April 2007 11:00 GMT

Anthony Carter-Moore

'Tis really free...

'Tis honestly free, as described..

I work for a bank in the City and have been trialling the service for a few months. There are one or two blind spots, but otherwise both the connection reliability and the speed have been pretty acceptable.

The session logout after a couple of hours is annoying though because it dosen't seem to check how much traffic is going over your connection - i.e. is it idle because you are in a meeting or are you in the middle of downloading a large file....other than that, ok.

Posted Monday 23rd April 2007 21:09 GMT

Anonymous Coward