Public Wi-Fi part of Tel Aviv’s ranking as ‘World’s Smartest City’
Tel Aviv, Israel, has a robust public Wi-Fi network that’s free to use and popular among tourists. Data collected in 2014 shows visitors to the city overwhelmingly accessed Wi-Fi from their smartphones.
The public Wi-Fi network in Tel Aviv comprises 180 free hot spots that provide coverage across the entire city, an area of more than 12 million square feet.
Network data for 2014 tracked by Tel Aviv Global shows that more than half of all the network traffic came from tourists and 85% of people accessing the network from their smartphones. Some 298,272 unique users accessed the network last year for a total of 579,917 entrances to the Wi-Fi network.
Users accessed the Wi-Fi network most often from the city center and from the beach with 41% of users opting to surf the Web in English and 36% in Hebrew.
“Today, access to free Wi-Fi is a basic service – just like it’s a city’s job to connect people to water and electricitiy – it also is our job to connect people to the Web,” Hila Oren, CEO of Tel Aviv Global, which provides international communications service, said.
Tel Aviv Global is an offshoot of the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality Mayor’s Office; the city led the public Wi-Fi initiative.
Oren said, “Free Wi-Fi is a new aspect of city-making. It’s only fitting that Tel Aviv, with its more than 1,000 startups – the largest concentration of innovation per capita on the globe – leads the world in this field as well.”
Tel Aviv was awarded the designation of “World’s Smartest City” at the most recent Smart City Expo World Congress, which is held annually in Barcelona, Spain.
Another aspect of Tel Aviv’s smart city initiatives is the Digi-Tel Residents Club services, which links an individual with custom information that includes road work updates, event reminders and discounts to public cultural events, among other services.
