I want to be European so bad.
Leaving the EU is one of the stupidest self harming things we ever did.
Who are you?
UK if I have to guess.
Title is wrong. It's an old initiative, not even funded anymore. Ran from 2018 to 2020 with 120 Million EUR.
A bit offtopic about a pet peeve of mine, but this is why it'd be super nice if social media that end up getting screenshot had absolute timestamps. Thank you for letting us know.
my bad! I misread the context and had not heard of it before - yet living in the EU. I will change the title. I got confused as I saw their post on LinkedIn, and it was posted recently: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/european-commission_wifi4eu-activity-7359136374895046656-oXYi
Ahh yes, border free travel.. wait a minute, why are the Austrian police on the border here? Wait a minute, why are they stopping us..
Because it's border free travel for EU citizens. It's still another country you enter, as of course, there are rules.
They stop you to check. You obviously pass through.
Also, there's still illegal import rules.
It's still schengen rules, so if you take a train the likelihood of being stopped at the border is pretty low. Austria may have border agents board the train and verify passports, but that's still pretty uncommon in Europe.
Well I don't know if that's a good use of EU money. I'd rather see investments in large and difficult infrastructure, rail, software, datacenters, industrial sectors we're currently lacking, grid investments - stuff like that.
End user internet access is more like thousands of small decentralised projects. The coordination might make it easier to use compared to if everyone did their own free wifi project, but that's such a small benefit...
As always, it's not like both aren't possible. As a matter of fact, there is a lot of railway projects ongoing at the same time, to only quote one of your examples.
A government can take care of more than one issue at a time, luckily.
It may be a small benefit for you (I assume you are german based on your server), but not every european country or citizen has the same access to internet. This is a good initiative, but obviously not primarily intended for the richer citizens/countries of the union.
I'm sure we could invest in all of them and money wouldn't be the problem.
I think this is mostly for non-EU tourists. You don't pay for roaming in EU anymore so you don't really need WiFi when traveling.
Well, speak for yourself. I don't have a running phone contract because I don't really use my phone much for calling or stick to open WiFi when I need to be online. Just got top-up mobile data for the times when there is no WiFi.
I definitely do want WiFi when travelling.
Recently mobile phone operators introduced a “fair use policy”, so it’s not really a”roam like at home” anymore, but data volumes can be limited to a fraction of what you are entitled to in your home country.
This is a point where WiFi might get more important again when traveling.
But why an App & not a PWA ?
Would have been nice indeed, however there is a web version: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints
Why not both?
PWAs are easy to maintain & lightweight
Not saying they aren't, just that a lot of folks will probably search their phone's app store and if they don't see it assume it doesn't exist for their phone.
Who said PWAs can't be put in an appstore ?
It's mind-blowing how at the same time some EU government guys pushing stuff like DSA while other do something like this (which is nice, and a complete opposite, if it's not honeypot anyways).
oh dude, they promised to be privacy friendly! maybe I'm just too american to believe in promises.
You don't have to trust them any more than you trust your local Starbucks WiFi. We're at the point where your traffic should no longer be vulnerable just because you're on the wrong WiFi network.
So, if I live in the EU, what's stopping me from cancelling my home plan and making the wifi experience worse for everyone?
The fact that there's 93k access points and that's not very many when you consider the size of the EU and the average range and speed of an access point.
Limiting the bandwidth use of individual devices is pretty easy, and basically standard procedure for public networks. Even cheap consumer routers that come with ISP subscriptions can do that.
Free Wireless ISP, you say?
cheapskate romanian sounds
Oh, sure. That's fair. Just like how the US kicked the Natives off of their land.
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