State of free wifi availability in Toronto

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Wed, 09/13/2006 - 19:56.

 

I'm up in Toronto this week to work on our First Nations project and other business, and see what the film festival is all about, so the first task at hand has been finding some free wifi... at first blush, seemingly harder to track down than in Cleveland, until you get in the know. Step one... finding a free wifi coffee house, which for me is Coffee Zone on Carlton. Once online, I tracked down "Wireless Toronto":

Wireless Toronto

We are a not-for-profit group dedicated to making no-fee wireless Internet access generally available. Our aim is to encourage the growth of wireless networking and to build community in interesting and innovative ways. We do this by setting up wireless Internet networks in parks, cafés, restaurants, bars and other publically-accessible locations across the city.

For a complete and up-to-date listing of our nodes, visit http://wirelesstoronto.ca.

Read the faq document for more information.

There is fortunately a wireless Toronto howspot right in our office building in Toronto, on Spadina.... at the Centre for Social Innovation, which is a very cool place itself, worth visiting... a more comprehensive version of the Civic Innovation Lab...

The Centre for Social Innovation is a non-profit social enterprise whose mission is to catalyze, inform, inspire and support social mission initiatives.  It achieves this mission by acting as a community centre and knowledge hub for social innovators and by providing shared space, services and incubation support to social mission groups in Toronto. Working with both emerging and established social innovators, the Centre for Social Innovation is:

  • Showing what social innovation looks like by documenting and profiling best practices
  • Exploring cutting edge ideas and accessing expertise that furthers the public good
  • Experimenting with new forms of collaboration to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the social mission sector
  • Providing practical solutions, help, information and programming to social innovators

So I'm not sure if Toronto is ahead of Cleveland or behind on wifi, but they are certainly running in the same race, and seel ahead with social innovation.

More on the tale of two cities as I have time on-line...