Santa Clara Introduces Free Public WiFi

By Paul Thomson :: 9:08 PM

The Silicon Valley, California city of Santa Clara rolled out free public WiFi across the city this week as part of an electric meter and infrastructure update.

Santa Clara’s new WiFi network spans across 19 square miles, offering covering for the 118,000 residents of the city. It is intended for more casual web browsing and e-mail checking rather than data-intensive tasks like video streaming or online gaming. The city has capped speeds on the network to about 1 Mbps.

The city joins another Silicon Valley in offering free Internet access. Earlier this month, the city of San Jose announced the launch of a free WiFi network that will cover its entire downtown.

“This is just one of the major benefits our community will enjoy as a result of our advanced metering technology,” said the director of the project, John Roukema. He expects that there will be over 5,000 connections to the public WiFi network each day.