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Évolution de Zap Québec: l'an passé ils ont eu 913 000 connexions et prévoit atteindre 2 millions cette année. Les 80 bornes publiques ont enregistrée plus de 500 000 connexions l'an dernier.

The Emanuel administration today is unveiling the first portion of a much-anticipated initiative to position Chicago for the digital age with expanded access to ultra-high-speed broadband links. The two-pronged plan, dubbed the "broadband challenge," seeks private partners to bring relatively low-cost, gigabit-speed Internet to 15 emerging business zones, most of them academic centers outside the Loop, and to offer free Wi-Fi in every park in the city.

"Conferences, airports, cafes - they might offer free WiFi to visitors, but they are often sluggish in their operation because everyone else is hogging the connection. This issue might become a thing of the past, after a team of engineers at NC State University (NCSU) announced the development of WiFox (via ExtremeTech), a new software protocol that could theoretically be added to existing Internet routers and is capable of boosting WiFi performance by 700 percent."

Virgin Media's WiFi on London Underground proves to be successful as over eight million tweets, Facebook posts, emails and web pages were delivered during the Olympic Games. Accessing WiFi on the underground is practically a social holy grail for Londoners. Known for their ability to avoid eye contact at all costs, a good excuse to remain eyes-down in any situation is bound to be popular.

"U.S. Cellular has added Wi-Fi to its mobile data toolbox. But rather than build or lease time on expensive managed hotspot networks, the Chicago carrier is working with Devicescape to tap into its virtual network of nearly 8 million open access points."

"At the time I began community broadband consulting in 2005, one of the stated core benefits of broadband was to improve economic development. Unfortunately, some of the biggest champions of the economic value proposition don't get it right, and big bucks being spent for broadband may leave communities shortchanged."

"Comcast says the cable giant is expanding the number of free Wi-Fi hotspots available to the company's east coast customers. According to Comcast, they've activated 2,500 additional hotspots throughout eastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire in locations Comcast found to be the highest-traffic regions. Comcast followed on the heels of Cablevision in 2010 and began offering free Wi-Fi to customers in the hopes of offering a little something extra to users in their battle against Verizon FiOS. Comcast customers can sign in wherever they see the "Xfinity WiFi" SSID."

O2 has got its free outdoor WiFi running across the most popular parts of Central London in time for the spectacle which is London 2012. Unlike the free WiFi on London Underground provided by Virgin Media the O2 WiFi service in these areas will remain free even after the close of the Olympics and Paralympics on 9th September.

BT Wi-Fi is the exclusive hot-spot provider for the London 2012 Olympics, and a promise made in 2011 to have some 500,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the capital has been met. The celebration for meeting this target was to deploy new wi-fi hotspots along 27 miles of the River Thames. The hotspots are a mixture of commercial deployments, and BT Total/Infinity customers offering access via the partner Fon. Though while the number of Fon sites is increasing, oddly in the TV advertising for BT Infinity it is neglected for the risky prospect of sharing a private Wi-Fi key with pretty people you don't know very well.

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) recently announced that the organization has finished their trials of the Next Generation Hotspot (NGH) standard. One of the more compelling parts of the new standard is the ability to automatically log into hotspots using simply SIM card identification and not the traditional username and password, something that will be highly beneficial to carriers using Wi-Fi offload to ease congestion on wireless networks. The WBA has just recently announced that numerous global telcos have agreed to begin conducting trials of the technology starting in the fourth quarter, with actual product being available sometime in the first half of 2013

"A Google spokeswoman said that promise of wireless Internet connections refers to systems it will install at more than 400 locations around the city for free. Google promised the free hookups for locations to be determined by officials in Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., as part of the agreement in setting up its network. The two cities have, as part of the same agreement, given building space to the company and assigned staff to fast-track permits for the construction of the Internet service."

There's free Wi-Fi all around you, particularly if you live in a big city. That café you walked by, that neighbor who didn't properly lock down her network, that public park you sat in on the way to work... free Wi-Fi abounds. But since you often have to hunt about for it manually, and you're unsure of its quality until you test it, you often just opt to stay on your 3G service--or to just go without Wi-Fi for the moment.

The Northern Ireland capital plans to make itself one of the most connected cities in Europe with widespread Wi-Fi to cover Belfast by 2015. Guaranteed funding of £6 million is already available through Westminster's plans to create Super Connected Cities. Further funding is possible through the scheme, and the Belfast City Council will be putting forward a bid which it hopes will more than double this funding.

"Giving is receiving" is an old adage that doesn't work for everyone - at least, not when it comes to Wi-Fi. Few of us are happy to discover unauthorized others have been leeching bandwidth off our hotspots' signals. But a new kind of WiFi hotspot launching later this year wants to change that. It's called Karma. And, like the regular kind of karma, it works by returning to you what you share with others. In this case, Wi-Fi. Anyone in the vicinity can log on to your Karma Wi-Fi hotspot for a pay-as-you-go fee of $14 per GB of data. In return for each person who purchases connectivity through your device, you earn 100 Megabytes of free data - about enough to browse the Internet for five hours, and open 10,000 emails.

After trials, Wi-Fi in the London Underground has gone live in two stations (Warren Street and King's Cross), with plans to fit 80 stations out before the Olympics, which are now only a few weeks away. From the article: '"Our new Wi-Fi service is a fantastic deal for Londoners, with live travel updates, entertainment and news freely available to everyone while they are on the move across the capital," said Gareth Powell, London Underground's director of strategy and service development. "Wi-Fi at Tube stations will help us improve the journeys of the millions of people that use the Underground everyday at no cost to fare or tax payers.