First free WiFi zone in Europe
25/09/2007 Written by Jakub Maslowski
The city of Szklarska Poreba, in Poland, has become the first “FREE HotSpot Zone” in Europe. This have been achieved thanks to cooperation of present FREE active HotSpots united into one huge single network. The free access to Internet without per-hour rates is now offered in more than 50 hotels, restaurants, bar’s and other places in the center city and the periphery, free-hotspot.com informed.
The development of the “FREE HotSpot Zones” could be obtained thanks to the collaboration between the government of the city, center for the winter sports and free-hotspot.com, society specialized in creating free hot spot’s, or we should call it free Wifi Zone’s!
“We were trying to find a way to make free Wi-Fi avilable for our citizens and tourists so that also our local activities could draw some benefit — Arkadiusz Wichniak has said, the mayor of Szklarska Poreba — we wanted this to be done without exposing city to heavy costs, so partnership with Free-hotspot.com was best solution we could think of. Crew of Free-hotspot.com was able to work with the owners of our local enterprises supplying the free logon and no cost access in whole Szklarska Poreba in the respect of these two criterias.”
“The free-hotspot.com service promotes Szklarska Poreba as very comfortable and pleasant destination,” says Grzinna Biederman, who’s in charge of the Office Marketing and Promotion of the city. “That feature will make people feel more comfortable within our city, they can send mail’s, talk with the friends, or simply stay in contact with the office, of course all of mentioned is now free of any charge”. We are convinced that our FREE HotSpot Zones will not only increase our normal tourist traffic, but will also help to attract tourists towards the many festival and events that we hold/organize(?) in our city during the year.”
Joe Brunoli, Vice-president of the development market of free-hotspot.com, has summarize advantages of “FREE HotSpot Zones” program : “Common places in Europe are trying to adopt such solutions in order to provide free internet access to their communities.” “Szklarska Poreba represents a first working example of this type: a combined effort from government and Wifi community to supply a free connection to the people without any costs for the city, but meaningfully increasing the entrances of the community.”
