Downtown Long Beach has it. Culver City has. Now it looks like all of LA will have it too - by 2009. Villaraigosa plans to install municipal wifi across LA: "Such a project, covering 498 square miles of the sprawling city, would be a massive undertaking, costing somewhere around $54-$62 million." Of course, the day the mayor made this announcement, Houston decided to one up us, and announced a plan for 600 sq miles of free wifi.
Its not clear yet if LA's free wifi will be as "free" as Culver City's - which installed filtering software to prevent illegal downloads and surfing porn. The software can also prevent all peer to peer traffic, even the legal exchange of content. (but its unclear if that has ever been activated).
what do you guys think? does this amount to goverment censorship or protection? does it defeat the purpose of free wifi or enhance it?
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