From tomorrow June 21, you can get free wifi on the Sydney Manly ferry service. The service is limited to 30 minutes or 30MB, which nowadays really isn’t that much, especially with those annoying auto-playing video ads on some news sites.
The service is provided by Tomizone. You connect your device to the tomizone@sydneyferries access point on the upper deck, open your browser and then log into the Tomizone portal. Once past the 30 minutes (just long enough for the trip) or past the 30MB, you can top up with your credit card.
Check out the Sydney Ferries post about their free wifi and top-up pricing, and make sure you read the FAQ on the Tomizone PDF.
Of course, they aren’t the first ones to offer free wifi. The private Manly Fast Ferry has been offering free wifi since mid May, as a three month pilot, provided by CafeScreen.
Any other Australian city ferry services having free wifi?
Stil wrote about the National Broadband Network in the recently released Federal Budget 2008 on Crickey with a follow-up post on his own blog: Rudd government delivers yesterday’s broadband.
It’s funny; just a couple of days ago when I met with David Mathews we were talking about something similar but with with the rollout of TransACT a few years back and how that network and infrastructure was obsolete before the project was completed.
And we’re about to see a repeat of that. In fact, as Stil says, other countries are already rolling out networks with speeds far above what is in the spec for this National Broadband Network.
So it seems we haven’t learned any lessons from previous such projects and we’re about to waste a whole lot of money doing it again – or are we? Perhaps it’ll never come to fruition, what with a large portion of the National Broadband Network budget “Not For Publication”.
Wireless infrastructure on the other hand is far more scalable and easier to upgrade.
