Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality has released details of the uptake of its city-wide free wi-fi system, launched by the municipality a year and a half ago. The network includes 180 free hotspots covering 3.7m square metres.

During 2014, 50 per cent of requests to access the network were made by tourists visiting Tel Aviv, with 85 per cent of these coming from smartphones. 298,272 unique users accessed the network in 2014 with a total of 579,917 sessions overall.

The data shows that only 36 per cent of access requests were made in Hebrew with English being by far the most popular language at 41 per cent, Russian 4 per cent and French 2.5 per cent. The most popular areas for wi-fi users were in the center of the City, its markets and Tel Avivs beaches.

“Today, access to free wi-fi is a basic service,” said Hila Oren, CEO of Tel Aviv Global. “Just like it’s a citys job to connect people to water and electricity, it is also our job to connect people to the web. Free wi-fi is a new aspect of city-making. Its only fitting that Tel Aviv, with its more than 1,000 startups – the largest concentration of innovation per capita on the globe – leads the world in this field as well.”

In a recent study carried out by Savills, Tel Aviv was ranked as one of the worlds top three tech cities, alongside San Francisco and Austin.