Originally published November 18 2005
Largest WiFi hotspot covers 700 square miles
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The "wireless cloud" stretches over 700 square miles, and was conceived and paid for (at the cost of $5 million) by Fred Ziari. His service is free to the public, but he has contracts with more than 30 city and county agencies.
While cities around the country are battling over plans to offer free or cheap Internet access, this lonely terrain is served by what is billed as the world's largest hotspot, a wireless cloud that stretches over 700 square miles of landscape so dry and desolate it could have been lifted from a cowboy tune.
In Philadelphia, for instance, plans to blanket the entire city with Wi-Fi fueled a battle in the Pennsylvania legislature with Verizon Communications Inc., leading to a law that limits the ability of every other municipality in the state to do the same.
But here among the thistle, large providers such as local phone company Qwest Communications International Inc. see little profit potential.
So wireless entrepreneur Fred Ziari drew no resistance for his proposed wireless network, enabling him to quickly build the $5 million cloud at his own expense.
While his service is free to the general public, Ziari is recovering the investment through contracts with more than 30 city and county agencies, as well as big farms such as Hale's, whose onion empire supplies over two-thirds of the red onions used by the Subway sandwich chain.
Morrow County, for instance, pays $180,000 a year for Ziari's service.
"When I'm inside it, I can take a picture of one of my onions, plug it into my laptop and send it to the Subway guys in San Diego and say, 'Here's a picture of my crop.'"
They are as close as a quarter-of-a-mile apart inside towns like Hermiston, and as far apart as several miles in the high-desert wilderness.
No major players were vying for the action here, making the area's remoteness - which in the past slowed technological progress - the key to its advance.
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