Opening the network

Access to the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre's Wi-Fi service will soon be available to everyone, and not just hospital staff.

Bruce Sutton, the chief information officer at the regional hospital, said Wednesday there has been a significant demand from patients over the years who want to use the hospital’s Wi-Fi service, which was only accessible to staff and physicians.

Because of that demand, the hospital board started to look into expanding that service, but Sutton said they still have to discuss potential security risks and if they should charge a user fee before fully expanding that service to the public.

 “We’ve been thinking about this for a quite a while,” Sutton said.

“The security issue is our biggest concern. That’s the reason why we’ve taken our time with this issue in particular.

“We also have some work to do whether or not we are going to charge and secondly we need some work on the actual network infrastructure.”

He said they hoped to have Wi-Fi available sometime in the fall.