Chilean town is WiFi pioneer
Seated on a bench outside his home in a small town in central Chile, 16-year-old Juan Barraza clicks on a Web browser and watches as an Internet page appears on the screen of his laptop.
No cables connect his computer to a phone line and neither Barraza nor his family subscribe to a wireless Internet service.
But the teenager is one of 12,500 people living in Salamanca, Chile's first WiFi town. As such, he has free access to cyberspace 24 hours a day, whether sitting at home, in the town square or enjoying the sunshine in a park.
"It's great, because now I can do my school homework much more quickly," he says.
Salamanca, 316 kilometers north of the capital Santiago, became Chile's first WiFi town in September.
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet hailed the project as the first of its kind in South America and as a major step toward "cutting the gap between rich and poor, between the capital and the regions, between the large and small cities."
Amid the dry, brown hills surrounding this town, 10 telecommunications antennae have been erected, providing Internet coverage for 88 percent of its people.
The project was partly financed by the owners of a local copper mine, Los Pelambres, which provided $56,000 for the antennae. The mine is one of Chile's biggest and is a major source of employment.
The WiFi project was led by the town's mayor Gerardo Rojas, who wants to increase coverage to 100 percent by reaching rural pockets on the edge of town.
"We want the whole of Salamanca to be lit up (with computers), and if there are areas that aren't lit up, it will be because not even NASA could reach them," he told Reuters, referring to the US space agency.
Agencies
(China Daily 01/10/2007 page16)
