Wider Angle: The WiFi Nation

My belief is that cities will overcome their battles with corporations to provide free wifi because corporations will be more interested in providing a faster Internet, be that Internet2 or something else, for private customers. Citizens will become dependent on Internet-capable devices such as cash registers, pocket pc's, and phones -- possibly even utilizing wifi for new mobile VOIP -- to do everything from get maps to find restaurants and check the weather, but for all those things the connection doesn't have to be blazingly fast. People want fast connections on their main machines to download, watch, listen, and play. But a public wifi system is not meant to be used for any of those things -- its purpose, as I understand it, is to make life easier and more enriching for the citizens by providing helpful data transfer for everyone in public areas.

Just as billions of people own mobile phones, billions also still have landlines. When the mobile phone became ubiquitous, traditional phones didn't go away. And neither will private demand for broadband; the experience will just be better, faster, and more reliable.

Telecoms "target lucrative, high-density markets to make a profit," explains Jim Baller, a Washington telecommunications lawyer. That has led municipalities to begin creating hotspots themselves, as a way to reach lower-density and lower-income areas that a profit-making company would ignore. More than a dozen communities—from downtown Baton Rouge, La., to San Francisco's Marina neighborhood—now have significant Wi-Fi coverage provided by the government at nominal or no cost. But the real tests of municipal Wi-Fi are in Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., both of which plan to begin blanketing their entire areas with low-cost Wi-Fi next year. Cities like Chicago and San Francisco are keenly watching those efforts—as are telecoms that have spent millions in for-profit efforts to provide wired broadband infrastructure.