Just 2 UK Municipalities Win EU Funds for FREE WiFi Networks
The European Commission has revealed the winners from their final call-up for vouchers under the €120m WiFi4EU initiative, which includes just 2 municipalities in the United Kingdom that should now receive vouchers worth up to €15K (£13.42K) to help them install FREE public WiFi broadband hotspots by the end of 2020.
The scheme originally aimed to equip “every European village and city with free WiFi internet access” by the end of 2020. Under this approach municipalities can harness the WiFi4EU vouchers to purchase and install Wi-Fi equipment (wireless access points) in their chosen centres of local public life, although any on-going costs for maintaining the network must be covered by the local authority.
The final call for applications under this scheme took place last month and included the remaining budget of €14.2 million, which was expected to cater for the distribution of around 947 vouchers on a “first come, first served basis.”
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The EC ended up receiving over 8,600 applications from all participating countries and the winners have now been announced (here). The United Kingdom ended up securing 2 vouchers for Ipswich and Sunderland, which is down from the 14 we scooped at the previous call-up (here).
At this point it’s worth noting that, while based on a “first-come, first-served” principle, all participating countries were nevertheless “guaranteed a minimum of 15 vouchers, provided they had sufficient numbers of applicants.” In other words, it sounds like there weren’t many applications from the UK. This may be down to issues of Brexit, a lack of awareness or simply the fact that public WiFi is already quite common in the UK.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I didn’t know there were only 2 towns in the UK
Must be a business or tourism case for this from the EU but i really cant get my head round why anyone would expect Tax funding to provide free to use wifi in a town.
I wouldnt blame my local council for not taking ‘advantage’ of a small grant, then assuming the ongoing cost of running and maintaining this, They have more logical things to budget for.
If you want connectivity while you wander round town, buy a data plan, I’d rather have my bins emptied regularly or improvements in any of the hundreds of other local authority services.
Often times local authorities can deploy wifi without any on-going costs, usually by agreeing limitations on the free connectivity and allowing the operator to offer the option of paid plans. As a result the only cost is installation and if the grants cover those then it just makes the model even easier.