NSW says bye-bye to free Wi-Fi

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 02 May 2008 07:46

Opinion and Analysis

Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell, whose Liberal Party website comes up with security errors in IE7 and Firefox when you try to open it (also highlighting their stunning technological ineptitude, too), also has no mention of O’Farrell’s statements.

But he’s quoted in The Age’s AAP report, where O’Farrell says: "Mr Iemma promised the free wireless network would be up and running by 2007. This is bad news for business and sends the wrong signal to companies looking to establish operations in Sydney."

Very clever use of the term “wrong signal” there, Opposition Leader. But no points for you. What company in their right mind would trust a free, public network with their business data anyway?

Any company would have a VPN installed for security purposes, of course.

But with anyone able to access the network, and with hackers happy to spend time trying to make life difficult for others, or abuse the network and download whatever they could, slowing the network down to a crawl, any business that would have relied on the NSW Government’s free Wi-Fi, rather than equipping their mobile staff with a 3.5G broadband wireless modem, wouldn’t have been a business I’d want to do business with.

So, free Government funded Wi-Fi is dead in NSW, and I’m very happy. It was a stupid idea to begin with, overseas experience had proved it a failure, and if it had ever gotten off the ground it would have cost everyone yet more money in taxes.

Thanks for wasting everyone’s time, NSW Government. Now... please... get back to work, whatever work it is you supposedly do 'for the people' while you scheme on how to win that next election, whenever it will come.