The town of Chesham in the United Kingdom has become the first town in the country to get smart pavement which beams high-speed Wi-Fi from beneath the feet of shoppers.
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You can check your bank account, use Facebook or catch up with X Factor at the bus stop in 30 seconds.
The pilot is now available to 21,000 homes and businesses in the area, which covers the centre of Chesham and parts of the 36-acre Lowndes Park.
Virgin Media is deploying access points underneath pavements to deliver 166Mbps public Wi-Fi in Chesham High Street as plans for a nationwide wireless network accelerate.
This allows users to pick up ultrafast Wi-Fi at distances of up to 80m from Virgin Media’s high street cabinets, according to Virgin Media.
Chesham has been granted the honour of being the recipient of the UK’s first Smart WiFi pavement this week.
Users will easily be able to connect by selecting “Virgin Media WiFi” from the WiFi settings on their device, although a few Android devices will need to connect through the Virgin Media WiFi Buddy app. As it’s a free public WiFi service, anyone can use it regardless of whether they’re Virgin Media customers. “We want to build more networks like this across the United Kingdom and encourage more forward-thinking councils like Chesham to get in touch”.
Along with free public Wi-Fi in Chesham, Virgin is also (finally) experimenting with providing a competing service to “BT Wi-Fi with Fon”, where Virgin Media subscribers have their at-home (or at-work) cable routers turned into Wi-Fi access points that can be used by other, roaming Virgin customers.
Virgin also says that its Wi-Fi hotspot street cabinets can generate signals that travel up to 80 meters per hotspot, so it sounds like coverage will be consistently strong.
MP for Chesham and Amersham Cheryl Gillan said: “The internet is at the heart of modern life and it is brilliant to have such a cutting edge network in Chesham and to be right at the vanguard of connectivity in the UK”.
Those same cabinets are now helping Virgin Media deliver connectivity through the UK’s first Wi-Fi-connected pavement.
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Chesham is demographically representative of the United Kingdom population as a whole and is of a size that allows a quick deployment of services across the whole town, rather than specific locations.
