..in Berlin

..at least that seems to be the vague idea of Michael Müller, head of Berlin’s social democrats party SPD.

So far it is not clear if this wireless web access would grant full range free access to ‘the real web’ - or just some kind of ‘city web’. The city Heidelberg at least offers such a reduced free-but-not-open web access solution, mainly ment to be used by tourists (see also the related article at Spiegel online (german))..

Of course instead I would warmly recommend a free municipal WiFi access solution to the ‘real web’ for Berlin - with full access to the internet, full email functionality, but maybe with some kind of bandwidth limiter installed so that misusing the free web slowing down the overall speed for everybody by uploading or downloading movies or other large files.. - ..but otherwise in my opinion the web should be freely accessible for everybody - everywhere.

I know there are various good examples of working open city access points - one good example can be found in the European neighbourhood: The Finnish capital Helsinki offers open access points already since 2006 (see also the related article at Helsingin Sanomat Newspaper) - first public libraries and offices opened up their wlan base stations, later some additional 70 stations were installed, today even public transport vehicles (buses and trams) offer free access points to their passengers (see also the related article at Helsingin Sanomat Newspaper) so that today a large area of helsinki’s city centre is covered by the city’s free internet access.

The biggest problem might actually be, that in Berlin things are usually not really decided quickly - and so it might be, that there will be alternatives growing quicker than the well discussed Master Plan. One of the most promissing alternatives I see is Berlins density of bars and cafés (see also  cafespots.de/wlan-hotspots/berlin for an (incomplete) overview). Quite many are already offering free wireless internet access - and i am quite optimistic that this trend will continue to grow and soon will cover most of the ‘interesting areas’ anyways - regardless to whatever the city council may come up with - or not..

Starting this post I first have to mention some translation curiosities I stumbled upon.. I first could not really believe that the English word for ‘Streik’ is ’strike’ - but that’s what my online dictionary suggested.. Well. Then I was wondering how I could translate the name of the German railway company - a word-by-word translation of “Die Bahn” would result in “The Train” or “the Rails” - but maybe it’s not a good idea to translate names anyways..

..anyways - back to the topic: the Description-Tag of the homepage of the Berlin city train company “S-Bahn” (www.s-bahn-berlin.de) says it quite clearly: The ‘S-Bahn Berlin GmbH’ is a company of the Deutsche Bahn Group - and is not part of the Berlin public transport company BVG. And this is the very reason why last weekend not only the train traffic was affected by the strike of the train drivers - but also the Berlin public traffic system was quite heavily affected. In other words: also the Berlin S-Bahn- / City-Train drivers went on strike.

This is also the reason why one could spot ‘parked’ city trains here and there - on the photo below you can see parked city trains I spotted from the bridge ‘Behmstraßenbrücke’ between Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg..

..looking at that picture one could think that two out of three trains were not in operation - but of course that wasn’t the case. I actually have no idea how many trains went - or not - in the news it was said that some lines were only served every twenty minutes, other lines only every fourty minuted - some lines even worse - looking at the reactions from different blogs I get the impression that this ‘largest ever train strike’ was quite ‘effective’ - or ‘effectful’..? Well..

..we’ll soon see if this strike actually leads to talks and/or a solution - otherwise the next strike might be just around the corner…

..greetings, t..

PS: see also:
-> some pictures of Berlin’s central railway station at bilderbook