Taipei - The World's First Major Cyber City

The city of Taipei, Taiwan, rightly deserves the title of the world's first "cyber city." Driven by the vision of Taipei's Mayor Ma Ying-jeou, the unwiring the city for broadband Internet access has been actively pursed for the last 8 years.

The W2i Digital Cities Convention in Taipei, June 28--30, 2006 coincided with the completion of the Taipei City Government and partner Q-Ware's WiFly broadband-wireless network, the largest of its kind in the world. For Mayor Ma Ying-jeou, who hosted the Convention with W2i, the moment was a milestone in his mayoral career. In addition to leading local authorities representatives from around the world in signing the Taipei Wireless City Declaration, Mayor Ma spoke passionately about the promise of broadband-wireless infrastructure, applications, and services for cities and communities.

Remarks of Mayor Ma Ying-jeou at W2i Taipei, 2006:

Birth of a Competitive Cyber City
I was inaugurated as mayor eight years ago, I was very interested in building a "cyber city." This year is the last year of my second term, and holding this conference marks an important period in my effort to build a cyber city. I hope this conference marks the beginning of a long process of cooperation and competition among cities in the area of broadband networks and ICT.

About seven years ago, we built an infrastructure and offered free e-mail accounts for life to all our citizens. This was way before Hotmail and Yahoo! Began offering their services. The city did not pay for this service. Instead, it went through an international bidding process, and three companies including IBM, won the bid. Currently, more than 240,000 citizens have received free accounts, and more than 300,000 citizens have received free Internet training. The motto was to encourage citizens to use the Internet more than they used the city's roads?"frequent the net and free up the roads."

The reason for this was that in 1999, AsiaWeek surveyed 40 cities in Asia and ranked Taipei as the second-most-livable city in Asia. However, while Taipei ranked high on most criteria, including ranking first in per-capita educational budget, it ranked 34th in number of motor vehicles per square kilometer of city road. While Singapore had 218 vehicles per square kilometer, Tokyo 248, and Hong Kong 274, Taipei had more than all three cities put together: 1043 vehicles per square kilometers.

I knew that I couldn't build any more roads because of limited land. I couldn't annex peripheral townships or the Taipei County Magistrate would kill me. And I couldn't create policy that would limit automobile growth, which would be political suicide. So the only option I had was to establish and build more cyberspace to replace the very limited geospace.

Building M-Taipei
In 2002, the goal was to begin deploying wireless broadband as part of the CyberCity Initiative. The idea of the initiative is simple: By using the broadband-wireless network, citizens can access the Internet anytime, anywhere and on any device, including through notebook computers, PDAs and mobile phones. The idea is not to be just connected but also to have mobility and agility.

To enable the project, the city selected Q-ware, on a build-and-operate basis, who committed to investing more than a billion NT$'s. The pilot project was launched in 2004 to connect 30 subway stations covering about 20 percent of the population, or 520,000 people. The next phase was launched in February 2005, when 2,000 access points were deployed to cover 28 square kilometers of the city, or roughly half the population. The third phase will be completed this July, when more than 4,000 access points will be deployed covering 134 square kilometers and a population of about 2.3 million. This makes Taipei the largest wireless deployment in the world, and it has been certified by JiWire.

The idea of the cyber city, especially the second phase of building and deploying