Wireless Users Network in Hong Kong

Finally, there is a non-profit wireless user group - HKWUN encouraging and promoting wireless community network in Hong Kong.

In US, Wireless Community Network has already been success and becoming more popular in the past two years. There are some successful communities to name: Seattle Wireless, NYCWireless, PersonalTelco (Portland) and Socal Free Net (San Diego, S. CA and Orange County).

In constrast, volunteer-base wireless community is rare and hard to find in Hong Kong. Most probably, in my opinion, it is because Internet access in Hong Kong is very common. Most of the citizens in Hong Kong has already installed Broadband service. In the crowded streets, you can easily find broadband service promotion counters around. Because the ease of reach, they would rather subscribe the broadband service instead of using the shared wireless network. Secondly, most of the residential flats in Hong Kong are small ( <1000 sq. ft.) and crowded. It does not like U.S., most of the residents live in a house, that have their own roof for installing the wireless equipments. In addition, in such crowded city, the wireless signal cannot go very far away as it can be easily blocked by other buildings around. This also makes public wireless network more difficult to expand its scale.

I have already contacted HKWUN to express my interest. You can find my discussion in HKWUN forum here. Moreover, few weeks ago, I also initiated a discussion about Wireless Community Network project in my living place, ParkIsland. Although it is still in planning stage and some issues and concerns are raised, there are already some supporters that expressed interest. I strongly believe that it could be successful if more and more people get involve in it.