We recently travelled over to Estonia for a briefing from one of our favourite clients. It was a great meeting and they treated us to some welcome hospitality in the restaurants and bars of Tallinn.
The thing that made the biggest impression on us (well, apart from the stunning women, -30C temperature and Russian Mafia types) was the free wi-fi access everywhere you went.
The hotel, cafes, pubs, restaurants, everywhere had free and easy access to wi-fi. It made such a difference not having to worry about being caned by o2 or getting ripped off for using substandard wi-fi when we just wanted to read an email or look at a map.
Estonia is one of the most wired (or unwired in this case) countries in the world – it’s the home of Skype and Kazaa – and the open wifi idea was the brainchild of a geek and his small organisation - http://wifi.ee – that lobbied hotels, pubs, cafes etc to open up their wifi to all.
Estonians now see free wifi as a right, if a coffee shop, pub or other public arena doesn’t have free wifi they will go somewhere else.
It is easy to see how this policy helps the takeup of new devices, technologies and mobile tools amongst the population giving Estonian developers the advantage of a highly connected target audience when developing and launching new ideas.
picture by – http://www.flickr.com/photos/mauricedb/888303238/
