Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Mark Weiss

Nortel this week announced that the 3,000-plus residents of the Greek island of Patmos, along with its thousands of visitors, will soon have free wireless internet access via UniNortel, a Greek joint venture between Nortel and Unisystems. The project is being implemented by local ISP 12Net.

"The island is the place where St. John wrote the New Testament's Book of Revelation - and is sometimes called the 'Jerusalem of the Aegean,'" writes Silicon.com's Natasha Lomas. "But today it plays host to [$100 laptop founder] Nicholas Negroponte, who owns a holiday home on it and has long had an interest in bringing internet access to the island, setting up local dial-up internet service provider 12Net in the 1990s. Negroponte's MIT Media Lab then went on to look at ways of bringing broadband web access to Patmos and eventually settled on wireless mesh networking tech as the best solution."

"The Nortel wireless mesh solution for Patmos - jointly developed in the Media Lab of MIT and the Nortel Solutions Interoperability Laboratory in North Carolina - will be launched this summer to provide wireless broadband and Internet access services across the island," according to the companies.

The press release is here.