Other Coverage: Daily Mail | BBC News
As recently covered by the BBC and the Times, Swindon Borough Council are offering a free public WiFi service to the entire of the town of Swindon. Offering high bandwidth, cheap services, this sounds like a technological boon for the residents of the town, but could it also be a public health experiment when so little is still understood about the potential health impacts of wireless technology?
There are currently about 75 mobile phone base stations in Swindon. Swindon Borough Council are about to effectively increase this number 20-fold. Swindon Council have invested about one-third of a million pounds in a commercial venture to exploit the modern telecommunications boom. They plan to install some 1,400 WiFi Access Points (mini-base-stations) across the city, mainly on lamp-posts. That works out to about one every 100 metres in every direction thought the city. Many of these will be right outside bedroom windows.