SPAIN: Madrid on the Wireless Smart Cities Map
GOWEX (GOW-MAB, ALGOW-NYSE Alternext, LGWXY-OTCQX), multinational leader in creating Wireless Smart Cities® and Inteligent WiFi in transportation, announced signing an agreement with the City Council of Madrid to extend GOWEX WiFi network to the main squares and open spaces of Madrid.
Madrid becomes one of the best connected cities in the world, after cities like New York, Paris, Dublin or Nice.
Madrid becomes one of the best connected cities in the world.
In the new WiFi City model, citizens will enjoy Internet access in public squares like Plaza Mayor, on public transportation as EMT, on franchises like Delina’s, Pans & Company or Coffee & Tea, etc. They will have to install GOWEX WiFi application on their devices, create an user and a password, connect to the WiFi GOWEX network and surf the web.
Thus, GOWEX integrates on a single network the key players part of the urban space enjoyed by citizens and tourists. More than 40 % of the Spanish capital is already covered with intelligent WiFi zones provided by GOWEX.
The announcement has been made by the City Counsel on a special day – May 17th 2013, the day when the network technology that has changed the world turned 30.
In 1983 Arpanet adopted the TCP / IP protocol and, the same year, was introduced the domain system (DNS).
On every May 17th we pay a warm tribute celebrating World Internet Day.
Let´s have a look at how Spanish people use the Internet:
According to the “demographic profile of Internet users in 2012″ study, published by the NIS (The Spanish National Institute of Statistics), Spain has more than 17 million daily Internet users. Basically half of the Spanish population between 16 and 75 years; a 9% more than the previous year.
On the other hand, 9.21 million of the Spaniards have never been connected to the Internet. This means 26.7% of the people aged between 16 and 74 years.
Spain is the European country with the highest penetration of smartphones, having a 66% of mobile users. 7 out of 10 people have a smartphone and the Internet feature on their terminal.
Despite these dates, according to a study on electronic commerce conducted by eMarketer, in Spain, there are 14.5 million people who shop online, a figure that will increase to 19.5 million in just four years.
Yet, Spain would be by 2016 the eleventh country in the world, behind China (423 million), United States (175), Japan (79.2), Germany (45.9), India (41.8 ), United Kingdom (38.9), Brazil (33.9), Russia (32.7), France (30.4) and South Korea (26.9), per total volume of Internet buyers.
Spaniards are very active on social media, 8 out of 10 Internet users are present on platforms such as: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google+, etc.
With over 22 million people surfing the web through WiFi networks, there is no wonder that the number of WiFi users increased in the last decade by nearly 1,600%.
On July 2013 will land in Spain the fourth generation of mobile network, the famous 4G. Users will navigate from mobile devices up to ten times faster than on the current platform – 3G.
Once again Spain is not a pioneer in this field. These networks are already present in countries like the U.S., Canada, Japan, Germany, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, UK, France, Luxembourg, Romania and Dominican Republic.
Where are we heading?
Experts say Internet is moving towards greater interactivity and, in few years, will be as common as electricity.
