Ah ok yes I see what you mean, Poitiers has none and is clearly some big place While “Le Bourg” probably a rich place, has a whole bunch of them

Of course getting the density of Poitiers for all of Europe on 120 million for 3 years is never going to happen on this approach.

Even though 35$/month per hotspot is reasonable. It’s just not the right approach. In reality nearly every single building in Europe has an internet connection and wifi routers.

Since there is not really such a thing as “keeping the RF spectrum of wifi to oneself” The logical approach would have been to socially engineer the default that ALL wifi hotspot would offer any random guest, free throttled courtesy internet access. Something that the ISPs have fervently opposed, something industry has made sure would not happen, at least not by accident. Through hardware design and the dissemination of horror stories. A more competent state would have used this money to just massage the existing infrastructure in opening up to their fellow citizens rather than try and build a parallel infrastructure with brute force money.

I hope they get their shit together and strong arm vendors into a more pro-social private infrastructure, since that essentially free at this point for all intents and purposes.