The State Library of Western Australia has been quietly offering free wireless for the past couple of months, ENABLEnet – Free wifi at the State Library of WA.

A comment about the demographics using the service stopped me in my tracks. It made me realise that I probably don’t know the profile of early adopters nearly as well as I presume:

The biggest surprise from the statistics is the language of the devices connecting, a third are English, a third Chinese, 17% Korean, 8% French, 3% German, 3% Japanese and the remaining 3% other European languages. This is due to the large number of international students who use the library to study and that the library is close to a number of backpacker hostels. One of our regular users can even connect from her hostel room.