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Not those kind, I'm wondering if any city has considered making their own infrastructure.

The Ebox and Teksavvy are great, but like you say it's hard to survive on other people's infra, that's why big cities need to make their own.

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I have a feeling that to do it right, it'd have to be a collaboration with an enthusiastic private partner, if for no other reason than available expertise. One city, Hamilton, Ontario, years ago tried out free public wifi. Great idea, but this was way back before smartphones were as big, so basically everyone used computers to access the internet. Not a huge deal, but the city rolled it out so poorly that the end result was signal strength that was only usable outside. Since few, again because of the time in which this happened, use an internet connection outside, few people were able to use the service, and it eventually just went away. A week of testing would have found this issue, but nobody in the city thought of doing so, likely because nobody technical enough with enough time was involved in the entire project -- it was simply a great idea, but nothing to back it up.

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