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posted by janrinok on Saturday October 01 2016, @11:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the Australia-rediscovered dept.

Melbourne Launches World-Class Free Wi-Fi Network

Victoria has cemented its reputation as Australia's tech leader with the launch of the country's largest and fastest free Wi-Fi network across Melbourne's CBD today.

Minister for Small Business, Innovation and Trade Philip Dalidakis joined City of Melbourne's Chief Digital Officer Michelle Fitzgerald at Southern Cross Station to announce the first of many Wi-Fi access points to be rolled-out across Melbourne as part of the Andrews Labor Government's $11 million Victorian Free Wi-Fi Pilot.

From today, visitors can use the VicFreeWiFi service within all Melbourne CBD train stations, the Bourke St Mall, Queen Victoria Market, and South Wharf Promenade at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

[...] Once the Melbourne network is complete, the VicFreeWiFi service will be the largest free public Wi-Fi network of its kind in Australia, covering an area of 600,000 square metres across the three cities.

Running for five years, the project is managed by telecommunications company TPG, allows for up to 250 MB per device, per day – and does not require personal logins or feature pop-up advertising.

You might recall that we published a story that Bing Maps appeared to have misplaced Melbourne, changing it from the Southern to the Northern hemisphere:

Microsoft's maps lost Melbourne because it used bad Wikipedia data • The Register

Submitted via IRC for crutchy

Microsoft has laid part of the blame for Bing Maps' mis-location of the Australian city of Melbourne by a whole hemisphere on Wikipedia.

Yes, Wikipedia, "the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit."

Microsoft made its admission after your correspondent took to Twitter on Monday to do what we in publishing call "pimping"the story of Melbourne's mis-placement.

[...] Deletion may be an option because our exploration of the Wikipedia page for Melbourne suggests it had the correct co-ordinates back in February 2012. So there you have it: Bing Maps sometimes relies on Wikipedia data. That data can be edited by anyone and is therefore often contentious.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/23/microsoft_lost_a_city_because_it_used_bad_wikipedia_data/


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2016, @12:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2016, @12:07AM (#408912)

    Making sense might also require information that wasn't in the original article either (not that I've bothered to RTFA).
    If the false coordinates were "added" to Wikipedia, then anyone savvy in editing Wikipedia pages may simply delete them, but based on the language I'm guessing the intention is "reversion" rather than "deletion" where the state of the page is reverted back to a previous time.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by butthurt on Sunday October 02 2016, @03:42AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Sunday October 02 2016, @03:42AM (#408974) Journal

    A previous story about the Bing Maps error explained that there was a sign error, so the co-ordinates for the city were transposed to the Northern Hemisphere.

    /article.pl?sid=16/08/23/1348219 [soylentnews.org]

    A few days later it was reported that the erroneous listing had come from Wikipedia, where the error had been fixed in 2012.

    http://www.techeye.net/news/microsoft-relies-on-wikipedia-and-loses-melbourne [techeye.net]