Information Stack
Wi-Fi Everywhere But Nowhere To Connect
Why can’t I just fire up my laptop anywhere and go online wherever I happen to be? Even these days when you see people schlepping laptops everywhere–into bars, car dealers, parks–hotspots are not quite ubiquitous. Starbucks still makes you sign up for a Tmobile or AT&T account before you can log in. And what ever happened to the free wi-fi cities like Portland and Philadelphia were going to give us, anyway? Hey, when I was a kid, the sci-fi books I read never mentioned that there would be any problems making connectivity for the masses easy. I want my 35 cents for each paperback back! Sci-fi, wi-fi. It ought to have been easy.
There are more reasons we don’t have universal access than there politicians have campaign promises they don’t keep. But the most important one is not a matter of spin. It comes down to one ugly word: infrastructure.
You can did like opposition research team and find some other answers, but infrastructure is really the biggie. It is one the author of the following mentions but he ought to give more weight:
http://blog.oregonlive.com/oldtown/2007/09/free_wireless_a_failure.html
Couldn’t MetroFi and the other vendors have seen the writing on the virtual wall before wasting millions? Many failures line the road to success, I suppose. And someone always has to pay.
Maybe this next guy has the solution. Steve Jobs didn’t seem to like him much (he may have his own plans) but then Steve can be snarky even though no one really threatens his place in the tech story anymore. Time (and money) will tell.