I once lived in the area where one of the Freifunk core contributors lives (Mannheim / Heidelberg / Karlsruhe / Rhein-Neckar Region). For years we also talked to the municipalities and the mayors of towns around the area, especially the smaller ones that had troubles getting their internet connections and bandwidths beyond 768kBit/s because they were ignored by ISPs and are kind of the best case for mesh networks.

But, as the saying goes, with the incompetent conservatives (CDU) there's no limit on how they waste tax money. If there is a friend of them doing something for more expensive, it's getting bought; because cheaper means always worse, right? Right?

For example, in a small town with around 20k citizens, they spend more than 50k EUR per year for two Wi-Fi spots near the local library, and those are "maintained" by an energy company. They also had to buy those access points for an initial sum of 20k EUR per access point, because they were very special and integrated in the street lights (not kidding you).

Network speeds are less than 10Mbit/s. For that amount of money per year, you could've easily gotten a fibre connection to the library building (which also has less than 10Mbit/s internet connection, so they are kinda fucked once more than 5 people use the internet there).

The moral of the story is somewhat that it's so ridiculous how incompetent politicians are when it comes to tech.

I'm kind of glad that this is an EU-driven project that's delegated top-down, because that means those incompetent politicians have no excuse to buy overly expensive tech stuff from their golf buddies anymore.

I think the EU initiative is better.

Volunteer-run infrastructure is fine, but you cannot rely on it. Can you really blame a volunteer if things break? No. They will hopefully fix it on they own time and dime, and that's good.

Volunteer-managed infrastructure is a courtesy. The fact that it's been reliable so far is no indicator of future reliability.

EU-driven initiative on the other hand supplies funds (15'000 euros, for proper hardware, maintenance and replacement parts) and uniformity: users in spain will have to go through the same procedures and configurations whether they are in italy, spain, germany, france or any other eu member state (does freifunk does the same?)

Some russian and chinese volunteers, just what we need

Sure, but neither my laptop nor my switch (the devices I'd reasonably use with Wi-Fi) support 5G or mobile internet at all

Depends where you are. In some European countries (Germany) mobile data is expensive. And mobile coverage even in cities can be kind of shit.

Technically this is the case, but due to operator pricing wifi is is still good option. 5G comes with the roaming charges (not so much problem within EU, although there are data caps) and at least local operators here in Finland don't really have good 5G packages for people with multiple devices.

Cell signal is terrible for privacy, uniquely identifying each individual’s location at all times. Though Wifi can also be tracked, it at least is possible to use anonymously with MAC randomization as is the default on many phones. (Leaving aside countries like Switzerland which outlaw wifi without mandatory registration.)

Mobile data in e.g. Germany is much more expensive so free Wi-Fi is always better.

Data caps are still a thing for mobile data, coverage is often shit (as a result the speed is hit and miss), and basically only smartphones can use it so you have to faf around with making a hotspot. P2P stuff like webrtc is also blocked because we can't have nice things.

This is indeed an old initiative, it's not a new thing.

In my experience, every mobile service provider (in NL at least) has different rules and restrictions on roaming data usage. For example, reduced data quotas, reduced data speeds, no guaranteed 4G/5G, etc.

yeah I have free roaming up until like 20GB in the EU with a 25e per month contract. Removes really any need to use wifi when travelling

Exactly what I thought. eduroam was everywhere. If you setup for their authentication mechanism, you get the funding.

Wi-Fi has the advantage of being usable on devices without a cell modem as well, such as most laptops, e-readers etc.

That said, now that many phones support dual-SIM, I do wish there was a low-friction way to connect to a local 5G network without downloading an eSIM profile and all that.

Yes, the initiative is from the EU for local administrations (so the Ajuntament gets the money for setting it up), though I didn't know there were bandwidth limits.

I can't speak for every install, but some of them do the tracking based on MAC (since it's the only identifier the network gets), so I guess you could avoid it by randomising your MAC and connecting again.

It's quite likely that some of these networks already had existing infrastructure used for something else (e.g. local free Wi-Fi under a different SSID, or a network used for some other non-public purpose), in which case 80 hotspots (probably meaning single access points?) would really not be unusual.

I've seen this happen in some airports or even entire cities that broadcast the Eduroam SSID as well. Most curiously, I've seen at least one drink vending machine in Japan broadcasting functional Eduroam.

Maybe it's just not adopted in your city yet?

> Connect to over 93 000 hotspots across the EU:

Looking at a few spots around me, it seems it includes some hotspots in public buildings and museums and so on. So on the map it shows e.g. 30 hotspots in a museum, which seems OK as you probably need that many for coverage indoors with the amount of people typically there.

5G WiFi and 5G the collection of cell phone technology standards have practically nothing in common other than they're both collection of RF signaling standards. 5G for cell phones means the 5th generation of standards, 5G for WiFi is meaning WiFi networks operating around 5GHz (5.15–5.85 GHz). Which 5Ghz WiFi is quite a ways away RF-wise from the normal 2.4GHz.

Just to make things confusing, there's also WiFi 5 (previously known as 802.11ac) which is a collection of WiFi standards. You can operate WiFi 5 on 5GHz. But you could also operate WiFi 4 (previously known as 802.11n) on 5GHz or 2.4GHz. WiFi 6 operates on 2.4GHz or 5GHz, and 6E operates on 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz. WiFi 7 and 8 operate on 2.4, 5, and 6GHz.

WiFi4EU phase 1 isn't a federated WiFi network, it uses whatever the WiFi operator uses. This makes a shared SSID less relevant. Not sure if phase 2, which will be OpenRoaming like, is active yet.

Does Openroaming require users to create an account? I'm not sure if this does.

At a first glance, Openroaming also seems to use "Passpoint"/WPA Enterprise, which not nearly all devices support, so at least a backup SSID makes sense.

There is some difference in included data packages between home and EU-roaming, but, yeah, it feels like it's about 10 years late. FWIF, 10 years ago I saw much more of free public WiFi. One part why it changed surely is security reasons, the other is just that people don't really need it that much, I think. I definitely don't rely on it that much (I do sometimes, because far cellular networks are not always available).

IDK, maybe I would feel different if I used laptop on the go more, but I doubt it. Having a mobile phone seems to cover it now.

Cheaper definitely depends on the region. In Germany a decent 5G without throttle is extremely expensive.

Your comments here seem to be based on the assumption every country in Europe has plans like the one you have (€20/100GB). Those plans don't exist everywhere.

Is it not on fDroid? Does it prevent sideloading?

Perhaps you are assuming that your conditions, plans, and access are exactly the same across all ~500 million people in the EU.

Because of shit like https://www.telekom.de/shop/tarife/smartphone-tarife?tariffI...

Data prices vary wildly by country. And no, you cannot use a foreign carrier to get cheap data and roam all year, they'll find you and charge out-of-package pricing for every gigabyte you've used (which isn't the standard rate).