Company to Blanket City Streets With WiFi Connected Smart PavementBy Kevin Samson So what happens when your entire city becomes one giant WiFi signal? Telecom giant Virgin Media has been given the green light to begin doing just that. Coverage will be enabled by discreet street furniture and the UKs first Smart Pavement. The pilot will begin with a focus on the center of the town of Chesham, UK where all 21,000 residents and businesses can use the network. The Chiltern District Council has joined forces and is touting the increased connectivity at massively increased speeds up to 166Mbps 7X the average in the UK. Virgin Medias press release cites one very happy local business owner who sees potential: Martin Parkes, local business owner and spokesperson for The Better Chesham Group, said: Its great that our customers have access to Virgin Medias public Wi-Fi both in and outside our salon. Were a very unique high street with many independent shops so we dont have the IT infrastructure that big chains benefit from. This will hugely help levelling the playing field and will hopefully bring more people to Chesham too. The company has high hopes that this will not be contained to one test city; rather, they make it clear that their mission is much wider in scope: Virgin Media is building better digital infrastructure by re-drawing the UK WiFi map. It is the first in a series of initiatives to deliver better out-of-home connectivity. It is not just about extending the companys ultrafast network to more homes and upgrading speeds to Vivid 200Mbps but being the defacto provider of trusted connectivity both in the home and out of the home. Gregor McNeil, Managing Director of Consumer at Virgin Media said: Not only is this the first time weve built metropolitan WiFi directly from our street cabinets, it is also the UKs first deployment of a WiFi connected pavement. It is literally public WiFi under your feet. We want to build more networks like this across the UK and encourage more forward thinking councils just like Chesham to get in touch. (additional emphasis added) Even if you dont believe having a permanent WiFi signal radiating across the city under your feet is a danger to your health, another aspect of pervasive WiFi may be of concern: privacy and surveillance. It is true that citizens of the UK already have become one of the most constantly surveilled on the planet, so perhaps they are becoming desensitized, but in the States it was a major news story when Seattle was discovered to have put in a secret WiFi mesh network funded by Homeland Security. The discovery led the ACLU to document the ways that residents and visitors could be spied upon while having their movements fully tracked. Although most of the outrage was directed at the secretive nature of the plan, the surveillance component is clearly present as a justified concern. There is also new WiFi tracking technology being developed that does not even need a connected device to home in on individuals or groups of people. You can read the chronicle of those developments HERE. Finally, this is about more than having super-fast Internet to download your favorite movie in seconds while you wait for the bus, or to boost your business capabilities. Its about the rise of fully connected Smart Cities that are multi-use, imposed without debate, and are very easily warped for less than noble purposes. Its about merging the domestic Internet of Things with an industrial smart grid that is part of a technocracy endgame as defined by the UNs Agenda 21. It is an all-encompassing agenda that has political support and the investment of every major tech company on the planet. It is imperative that we learn and share what this overall Smart Cities agenda entails, and reveal each piece of the superstructure that is being built in front of us. The road has now been paved. Image Credit: Virgin Media Kevin Samson writes for selfnewsPost.com and TechSwarm.com 