Wiki WiFi: The desi-heavy island of Mauritius is turning into even more of a hot spot. It plans to be the first island with blanket wireless Internet (via Slashdot):

From his office window in Mauritius’ new Cybertower–a sleek blue glass and gray stone tower that is the heart of the country’s first high-tech park–Rahim can point out one of five new radio transmission antennas his company has installed in the last month perched beside a Hindu temple on a nearby green mountainside… The antennas now beam his wireless Internet service over about 60 percent of the island and within range of 70 percent of its population… Getting to every last corner, he said, might take a little longer. “We have so many sugar cane fields,” he lamented, tracing the island’s outline on a map.

An undersea broadband fiber-optic cable, completed three years ago, gives the island fast and reliable phone and Internet links… Many of the country’s 1.2 million people–a mix of French, Indian, Chinese and African descendants–are bilingual or trilingual, speaking French, English and either Chinese or Hindi. The country is democratic, peaceful and stable…

But the government’s telecom monopoly made it reluctant to issue the permits:

Because the government makes so much money from the company and its cable, it has been reluctant to open the market to competitors that might reduce Telecom’s profits, even though the country’s National Telecommunications Policy, passed in 2004, calls for “positive discrimination” by regulators in favor of start-up companies facing off against established firms like Telecom.

Mauritius really does sound like India 😉

Related post here.