Guiyang's free Wi-Fi project to aid growth

Editor's Note: Provincial regions and cities in China are holding their annual conferences of lawmakers and political advisers. To inform our readers of the latest changes in various parts of the country, China Daily is reporting about some of these conferences.

Free Wi-Fi will be made available to residents of downtown Guiyang, capital of Guizhou, as the underdeveloped province looks to technology to boost its economic development.

In the provincial People's Congress Session, the annual government report listed the project as one of the top tasks this year, enabling Guiyang to become the first city in the southwest region to offer free Wi-Fi.

The project, undertaken in September 2014, is a cooperation between the local government and influential IT companies in China such as Foxconn, Alibaba and 21 Vianet, the report said. The cooperation includes technological support establishing a big-data center and infrastructure.

Under a strategic cooperation framework agreement the city government signed with Nasdaq-listed 21 Vianet Group, a joint venture will build a cloud computing center and big database project, which will provide a data network covering the city's entire infrastructure.

To ensure the big data industry develops in a healthy way, an industry chain will be brought into the project, including the establishment of a 3 billion yuan ($485 million) big data fund.

Chen Gang, Party chief of the CPC Guiyang Committee, said the first phase of the project will be finished in June, by which time citizens should be able to type their cellphone numbers into the login page and the access code will be sent to their phones.

He said the first phase will have 2,000 access points to provide Wi-Fi connections. The project will take two to three years to complete, by which time the entire city will be covered by a free Wi-Fi signal.

The project is expected to later expand to neighboring cities in the province, he said.

"I am pleased to hear such service will be available because I'm tired of being asked for a Wi-Fi password everywhere I go, and the Internet via smart-phone or iPad has become part of people's daily lives," said Wang Xi, a 21-year-old student at Guizhou Normal University.