Waiting for Wi-Fi
by Volker Weber
Outside of airports and Starbucks, the wireless Net is still hanging fire. You can build your own node, but who'll hook you up with the rest of the world?
You'd think there'd be enough laptop-toting yuppies around to fill a Starbucks in San Francisco. It's been months since the chain equipped 50 of its stores in the area with high-speed wireless Internet access. But a tour of both Starbucks and independent coffeehouses served by the separate Surf and Sip Network uncovers a disheartening trend: Even at the spacious Brickhouse Café, newly renovated in the heart of Multimedia Gulch, I'm the only one logged on to a high-speed connection that costs hundreds of dollars a month to operate.
Maybe coffeehouse computing is just uncool, but a key problem is that at this point a Starbucks is one of the few places you can get wirelessly online outside of the office. Never mind that by the end of this year, more than 10 million computers will have 802.11b hardware (better known as "Wi-Fi," for wireless fidelity) installed. The hardware may be there, but easily accessible networks connected to the Internet are not.
Comments
Recent comments
Marco Klop
on Synchronizing iPhone with ... Lotus Notes at 18:55
sunny gerscky
on Pwnage 2.0 released at 16:00
Tobias Lange
on Remember, it's always the cable at 13:16
Volker Weber
on Remember, it's always the cable at 12:21
Ian White
on Remember, it's always the cable at 11:56
Andy Brunner
on Remember, it's always the cable at 11:37
Ben Rose
on Remember, it's always the cable at 11:33
Ben Poole
on It has only been less than two hours at 09:44
Frank L. Quednau
on It has only been less than two hours at 09:29
Martin Hiegl
on It has only been less than two hours at 08:27
Stephan H. Wissel
on Notes.ini parameter RunFaster=1 is finally here at 05:24
Volker Weber
on It has only been less than two hours at 01:33
Thomas "Duffbert" Duff
on It has only been less than two hours at 01:26
Chris Linfoot
on Planet Lotus not picking up Christopher's feed at 21:56
Yancy Lent
on Planet Lotus not picking up Christopher's feed at 19:48
Bruce Elgort
on Robin Bloor: Why Google Chrome Will Dominate at 18:51
Mac Guidera
on Planet Lotus not picking up Christopher's feed at 16:04
Kevan Emmott
on 824 Chrome users so far today at 15:56
Chris Linfoot
on Planet Lotus not picking up Christopher's feed at 14:54
Lars Berntrop-Bos
on Planet Lotus not picking up Christopher's feed at 13:12
Andreas Braukmann
on 824 Chrome users so far today at 11:33
Nick Daisley
on Robin Bloor: Why Google Chrome Will Dominate at 10:14
Chris Linfoot
on Planet Lotus not picking up Christopher's feed at 09:42
Alper Iseri
on 824 Chrome users so far today at 09:38
Jean Pierre Wenzel
on 824 Chrome users so far today at 08:37
Click here to subscribe
Post a comment