Zhang Yuhang, vice director for the Application Promotion Department of the Municipal Informatization Office of Beijing, said during the Wireless City Summit 2008 held in Beijing that the capital city's wireless city construction will cover all of Beijing's urban and suburban areas before the end of 2011.
To serve the Beijing Olympic Games, the first-phase project of Beijing's wireless city network started trial operation in July 2008 with a coverage of 100 square kilometers and covers such areas as the Second Ring, the Third Ring, the CBD commercial area, the Financial Street area, the Zhongguancun area and the Wangjing Economic and Technological Development Zone. According to this planning, Beijing is currently the largest wireless city in China.
However, there are still blind spots within the coverage of the wireless network in Beijing. Zhang says the coverage of Beijing's wireless network construction will be gradually expanded and the network will especially cover Beijing's functional core areas, functional extension areas, new development areas, ecological conservation and protection areas, and the six important industry functional areas.
At present, Beijing has launched small-scale model network construction and application experimental units in Xuanwu, Chongwen Chaoyang, Shijingshan, Daxing and Pinggu to evaluate the application results and the commercial model.
In addition, the wireless network is available in nearly half of Beijing's universities and colleges with a total number of over 3,000 indoor and outdoor access points. Of those, Tsinghua University alone has about 500 campus wireless access points.