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.
