The key railway artery in Japan, the Shinkansen or "bullet train" line between Tokyo and Osaka, will introduce Wi-Fi by March 2009, Japan Railways announced.
These trains are already incredibly comfortable, primarily because they are clean and quiet, and they usually deliver you to a key central location in each city. Another perk is the on-platform food vendors who sell totally passable box lunches, sometimes including sushi, without much of a mark-up.
The main drawback to these trains is they're not cheap. And while the JR announcement (in Japanese) doesn't mention whether there will be a charge, I'm guessing they'd brag if it were free, and free Wi-Fi is pretty rare in Japan, at least compared to Chinese and U.S. cities, where coffee shops rarely have the infrastructure for paid connections.
The service is to offer up to 2 megabit connections, and will be built in cooperation with NTT, Japan's massive, partially government-owned telecom.
I can't wait to be in Japan and rich enough to tick off the minutes at high speeds online. Until then, riders will have to search for ambient signals at station stops to send and receive e-mails, something I've found works pretty well on downtown Tokyo JR trains, but can be much harder on the Shinkansen.
Via Ajiajin, and thanks Hose.
Anticipated wireless coverage areas in Beijing. If they work, they are advertised to be free until after the Olympics.
(Credit: Wicity via Sina)Beijing Wicity is setting out to cover several key parts of Beijing with Wi-Fi access, and it is supposed to be free until after the Olympics, which will take place August 8-28, but service is spotty in advertised coverage areas.
Danwei reports that Wicity, not to be confused with WiiCity (which doesn't exist, but would be a pretty fun place), is a project of Chinacomm (中电华通). Wednesday is the first day of the test stage.
People in an office in Beijing's Central Business District, or CBD, report that they see the network but cannot get online. I'm sitting in a cafe in Sanlitun, and I don't see the network on either my MacBook or my HTC Touch.
In the name of competitiveness, Hong Kong has announced that it will expand the free wi-fi available at government buildings to 350 public locations around the city, Xinhua reports.
The GovWiFi program now gives free access to wireless Internet at over 30 government buildings and will have put in place around 2,000 hotspots to cover about 350 locations by mid-2009, said Frederick Ma, secretary for commerce and economic development. ...
The program will cover libraries, government offices, job centers, public inquiry centers, sports, cultural and recreation centers, community centers and parks.
Targeted hotspots are a nice consolation prize, as many cities discover that pervasive municipal wi-fi is not going to happen soon--as alluded to most recently by this New York Times editorial. The Times board concludes:
Broadband service is no longer a luxury. It has become a basic part of the infrastructure of education and democracy. EarthLink should fulfill the commitments it made. Even in these tough economic times, cities should keep pushing municipal Wi-Fi and looking for partners and plans that can make it a reality.
Broadband isn't quite the immediate goal in China, where basic internet literacy and computer ownership has a long way to come. The country has more than 200 million internet users, but by comparison, it has somewhere in the range of 200-300 million migrant laborers, most of whom have little or no access to the web for lack of money. As nice is it would be for them to be able to call home using Skype or write e-mail to family, the internet is serving a different population here.
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