this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025

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European Commission has a "Wifi4EU" initative, provides 93k high-speed private access points across the EU, free of charge. (infosec.pub)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) by Sunny@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

134 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/25779751

The intative promises to be privacy-friendly with no tracking. Stating:

Your privacy is important. The WiFi4EU app ensures a private online experience with no tracking or data collection. Simply connect and enjoy free public Wi-Fi without concerns.

Source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/wifi4eu-citizens

Will be interesting to see how this spans and plays out in reality. Looks promising too, did a quick scan of their builtin permissions and trackers and looks good too. (Scanning tool is called Exodus)

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[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago

Leaving the EU is one of the stupidest self harming things we ever did.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 35 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Title is wrong. It's an old initiative, not even funded anymore. Ran from 2018 to 2020 with 120 Million EUR.

[–] AlsaValderaan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 3 hours ago

A bit offtopic about a pet peeve of mine, but this is why it'd be super nice if social media that end up getting screenshot had absolute timestamps. Thank you for letting us know.

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 7 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

my bad! I misread the context and had not heard of it before - yet living in the EU. I will change the title. I got confused as I saw their post on LinkedIn, and it was posted recently: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/european-commission_wifi4eu-activity-7359136374895046656-oXYi

[–] viking 2 points 1 hour ago

It's still active as in, they maintain the hotspots. But I just had a look at the map, and it looks like there's spotty service mostly clustered around tiny villages, rather than providing coverage to areas that actual get significant tourism or other visitors.

[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 16 points 11 hours ago

Ahh yes, border free travel.. wait a minute, why are the Austrian police on the border here? Wait a minute, why are they stopping us..

[–] biotin7@sopuli.xyz 5 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

But why an App & not a PWA ?

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 4 points 7 hours ago

Would have been nice indeed, however there is a web version: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Why not both?

[–] biotin7@sopuli.xyz 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

PWAs are easy to maintain & lightweight

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Not saying they aren't, just that a lot of folks will probably search their phone's app store and if they don't see it assume it doesn't exist for their phone.

[–] biotin7@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 hours ago

Who said PWAs can't be put in an appstore ?

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 30 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Well I don't know if that's a good use of EU money. I'd rather see investments in large and difficult infrastructure, rail, software, datacenters, industrial sectors we're currently lacking, grid investments - stuff like that.

End user internet access is more like thousands of small decentralised projects. The coordination might make it easier to use compared to if everyone did their own free wifi project, but that's such a small benefit...

[–] iglou@programming.dev 8 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

As always, it's not like both aren't possible. As a matter of fact, there is a lot of railway projects ongoing at the same time, to only quote one of your examples.

A government can take care of more than one issue at a time, luckily.

It may be a small benefit for you (I assume you are german based on your server), but not every european country or citizen has the same access to internet. This is a good initiative, but obviously not primarily intended for the richer citizens/countries of the union.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

I would say it's a small benefit for anyone. It's not like people will walk to the town square, or the park or the hospital to use some free EU Wifi.

The title is also very wrong I found out. It's not being launched. It's not even funded any more.

Wifi4EU ran from 2018 to 2020 with a funding of 120 million EUR. They paid up to 15 thousand EUR for equipment and installation per municipality, the local municipalities had to pay for the internet service and maintenance.

This is the result: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints

Still looks like a pointless exercise to me.

[–] rainwall@piefed.social 4 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

15k for several distinct hotspots in a city is pretty reasonable, depending on what equipment they are using.

Enterprise quality IT gear is expensive. Each access point can easily be 1k, and that excludes any routers/firewall/switching that you may need at each site. As an example, I've worked in places that had small retail locations that at a minimum had 8k of network equipment, with some locations pushing into the 100k+ range based on needs and size. That's per site. The above is all in USD, but just equipment. Labor can add 30% to the costs.

15k euro for a whole city that includes equipment and installation sounds very fiscally responsible.

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 hours ago

My city runs it's own wifi hotspots all over the city, and it is quite a nice feature, especially if your data plan isn't very good.

[–] Baleine@jlai.lu 17 points 15 hours ago

I'm sure we could invest in all of them and money wouldn't be the problem.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 23 points 16 hours ago (8 children)

I think this is mostly for non-EU tourists. You don't pay for roaming in EU anymore so you don't really need WiFi when traveling.

[–] ook@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 11 hours ago

Well, speak for yourself. I don't have a running phone contract because I don't really use my phone much for calling or stick to open WiFi when I need to be online. Just got top-up mobile data for the times when there is no WiFi.

I definitely do want WiFi when travelling.

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