At an outdoor cafe across the cobblestoned street from a 13th century church in Estonia's capital of Tallinn, Veljo Haamer explains why his small country is so much ahead of so much of the world in wireless Internet access.
Haamer, one of Estonia's unofficial chief geeks, is largely responsible for a level of Wi-Fi connectivity-–even in remote areas-– that puts the biggest cities in America to shame. For the last three years, he and a handful of volunteer evangelists with the
WiFi.ee organization have successfully lobbied Estonian cafes, hotels, hospitals, city parks, local governments and even major gas stations to start offering Net access, helping to design and set up the networks.
The results have been nothing short of astounding. I recently spent nearly three weeks traveling around the small Baltic country, and found that in small-town cafes, city parks--even in a remote national park in a town without so much as a bar or restaurant-–I was able to turn on my laptop and go online at the touch of a button. But Haamer wants even more.
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Nov 1, 2005, 08:02 PM
