Manchester, UK Planning Free Citywide WiFi

Inspired by municipal WiFi projects in San Francisco and Amsterdam, Manchester city council have announced plans to blanket the city with a high speed wireless network.  Once up and running the proposed WiFi network would extend to cover 90% of the Greater Manchester area, servicing approximately 2.2 million users.  Manchester’s wireless network will be entered into the UK government’s Digital Challenge Initiative, the winners of which will receive £3 / ~$6 million of funding.  Plans for the network indicate that it will initially operate over a 100 square mile area with an expansion to 400 square miles some time in the future.

Municipal wireless networks are increasingly being seen as a basic service to be provided by local governments.  I’m sure there will be some caveat in most of these networks, in other words they will operate on a tiered basis where you can freely access the network at slow speeds or pay for more bandwidth / speed.
Recently we covered plans to blanket London’s borough of Westminster as well as Sydney and other Australian cities with a high speed wireless network.