Telstra has recently announced a plan to create one of the world’s largest Wi-Fi networks here in Australia and across the globe.
Telstra Wi-Fi is aiming at offering all Australians, regardless of whether you are a Telstra customers or not, access to two million Wi-Fi hotspots across the nation within five years. Gordon Ballantyne, Group Executive, Telstra Retail said:
Our Wi-Fi vision is about giving our customers the best possible experience and creating a brilliant connected future. It’s about giving you more ways to connect.”
With Telstra Wi-Fi, we are moving Wi-Fi outside the home. It will uniquely allow you to enjoy greater value from your home broadband service by making your home broadband allowance accessible at Telstra Wi-Fi hotspots across the nation. It will also connect you in millions of places overseas through an exclusive partnership with global Wi-Fi technology provider Fon.
Telstra’s plan is to work in partnership with local councils and enterprises to grow their Wi-Fi network in Australia’s largest cities and regional centres. They will invest in building thousands of Wi-Fi hotspots across the country in popular tourist spots, theatres, entertainment venues, transport hubs, hotels, cafes and shopping precincts.
Overall, the network will be built by us, but brought to life, in part, by you. We’re really looking forward to watching it grow! It will be a living community, steadily growing – house by house, street by street, business by business, city by city. Together, we are creating one of the world’s largest WiFi networks to better connect Australians.
The details on how non-Telstra customers can access this service and what the cost will be is a bit sketchy at the moment. However a comment on the Telstra post from the Editor says:
You will be able to get access to the WiFi network in exchange for sharing a portion of your bandwidth with other Telstra WiFi customers, so not free as such.
The network is scheduled to launch from early 2015. You can register your interest or join the conversation using #WiFiNation.
i had seen this in Thailand while i was there few weeks back…. where the local carriers have set the wifi hotspots in all shopping malls, airports and public places so ur phone connects to wifi as soon as ur near a public place, which is nice 🙂
Hopefully this means they are releasing cable modems with better WiFi range.
Also, they claim sharing won’t slow down the connection. Are they planning on using some sort of magic to add new bandwidth to cable and ADSL connections?
Still, the concept does have merit so will be interested to see how it develops.
Wouldn’t trust Telstra to manage others using my WiFi correctly. They still haven’t released a major bugfix update to Xperia owners despite Optus and Vodafone having already rolled out the update weeks ago.
Telstra is the best Telco company.
i’d settle for them making their plans feature more data