Alan Oppenheimer of Open Door Networks, Inc. sent us a note about the Airport project they’ve started in Ashland, where Open Door is based.
I don’t know if you know Ashland, but it’s pretty much a tourist town. It has the biggest Shakespeare festival on the west coast, along with all sorts of great outdoor stuff. Many bay area locals come up this way in the summer.
Anyway, the city has a cool, gigabit Ethernet based, city owned, cable modem system (see this CNet article for instance). We’ve recently put an Airport base station in the local Starbucks, and, on February 1, we’ll be rolling out high-speed, wireless Internet access to the whole community. And it’s going to be free! People will just bring in their Airport/802.11-enabled laptops, get some coffee, and surf away at cable modem speeds!
We’re calling the project “Ashland Unwired.” We’re hoping that Starbucks will be just a start, and that we’ll unwire much of the town over the next year.
