

15k for several distinct hotspots in a city is pretty reasonable, depending on what equipment they are using.
Enterprise quality IT gear is expensive. Each access point can easily be 1k, and that excludes any routers/firewall/switching that you may need at each site. As an example, I’ve worked in places that had small retail locations that at a minimum had 8k of network equipment, with some locations pushing into the 100k+ range based on needs and size. That’s per site. The above is all in USD, but just equipment. Labor can add 30% to the costs.
15k euro for a whole city that includes equipment and installation sounds very fiscally responsible.
Yup, those are the same devices for roughly the same cost. Being the same devices, they fit the same niche regardless of vendor. I think Framework is selling this to step into the “home/smb ai enthusiast” market.
Id say their advantage over gmktech is the fact that you can buy just the mobo/cpu/ram combo. You dont have to buy the full desktop from framework, but you can. Thats “modular” in the scope of the platform. It lets you do wacky things like this video, where Jeff has already set up a half width rack mini cluster of 4 of them in an adhoc ai home lab data center experiment.