Frederiction, New Brunswick is a charming city in a charming province and is even more so now for the foresight of its municipal council and leaders. Late last week, Frederiction announced it was, so far as anyone knows, the first municipality in Canada to light up a Wi-Fi network. The Fred e-Zone will be available in many of the city's public areas, the city said. "Like streetlights and sidewalks, this intellectual infrastructure is becoming the new municipal infrastructure of the 21st century for smart communities," the city said in a press release announcing the deal.
New Brunswick is actually a hotbed of techno-activity. A few years ago I got to visit some test facilities run by the provincial phone company Aliant in Saint John. This Living Lab, as they called it, was a place for vendors like Cisco and Nortel to deploy and test new types of equipment and services. Over in New Brunswick's third city, Moncton, Aliant was trying out a fabulous DSL product called Vibe, which put 30 megabits of bandwidth to its customers for the price of most 1 megabit services in other parts of Canada. Considering it takes about 6 megabits of bandwidth to deliver a television signal to a home, the Vibe service offered all sorts of possibilities for Aliant. But then Aliant became absorbed by one of its minority shareholders, the same company the owns my employers, CTV and The Globe and Mail, and the Vibe service was killed. A shame really. Still, DSL services in Atlantic Canada are among the best in the country. And now, of course, there's Wi-Fi all over Frederiction.