Word: fi
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...free wi-fi in San Francisco, the city has Brewster Kahle to thank for sowing the seeds of SFLAN back in 1997. An entrepreneur who sold his search-engine business to Amazon.com Kahle now runs the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that collects and stores a vast library of defunct Web pages. He buys his Internet access wholesale from a local company at the bargain rate of $30 per megabit per month. The archive needs many thousands of megabits to do its job, and Kahle considers the amount of bandwidth that Pozar's San Bruno antenna requires--which costs Kahle less...
There's the rub--one that pay-for-service wi-fi providers are quick to point out. Such companies as Comcast and SBC grumble about free wi-fi services the way parents complain about their teenagers, calling them unreliable, irresponsible, spotty and insecure. They may have a point. "A company providing only free access would defy the laws of economics," warns Mike Short, senior vice president of engineering at the Silicon Valley wi-fi firm Gric. He and others believe that somewhere along the line, somebody is going to have to pay for the connection...
True, but that somebody could be the taxpayers if, as some propose, the government were to subsidize free wi-fi as a public utility--which is already happening in downtown business districts as diverse as Long Beach, Calif., and Athens, Ga. That may sound radical, but federal intervention at some level will probably be necessary if wi-fi is ever to become as widely available as the wired Internet is today. For one thing, wi-fi operates on a radio band that is already terribly overcrowded. "We need federal help," says Pozar, "or this is going to turn into just...
...perfect wi-fi world, you wouldn't have such a hard time spotting the 18-in. antenna on top of San Bruno--because it would be the only one there. Theoretically, given enough unlicensed radio bands and megabits too cheap to meter, you could transmit via wi-fi all of today's broadcast TV and radio programs and every phone call (cellular or wired) as well--most of it free. That may sound like a tin-can-and-string utopia, but if the past 50 years of technology have taught us anything, it is this: never underestimate what geeks with...
...that looked like two half-moons back to back was scrawled beneath the words "Outside the Box." What did it mean? Was it some bizarre pagan ritual conducted by aficionados of business slogans? Nope--Outside the Box was the name I had assigned on my computer to my wi-fi network. There was only one explanation: I'd been warchalked...