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...what about those 11 million U.S. road warriors: How can they be sold on Wi-Fi? Starbucks, in partnership with T-Mobile, had already launched its in-house Wi-Fi network, which you could pay for by the minute or subscribe to by the month. The San Francisco-based Surf and Sip network offered a similar service in independent coffee houses. If the typical road warrior turned out to be a fan of Grande Double Lattes, Cometa could be sunk before it started...
Another big question: What kind of threat is the free-Wi-Fi movement? In major cities, many home users are leaving their networks open--either as a public service or, in more cases, accidentally--meaning anyone can use those networks to surf freely without a password. The practice of looking for those networks--known as wardriving, in homage to Matthew Broderick's wardialing in the movie War Games--got a boost when the descendants of ham-radio enthusiasts figured out that you could pick up a much stronger signal by welding an empty Pringles can to your Wi-Fi card...
Then came the habit of warchalking--which began in London and spread around the globe--in which wardrivers would mark the presence of free networks with a strange hieroglyph--parentheses in reverse order--in chalk on the sidewalk for all to see. "The beauty of Wi-Fi is that it is so decentralized," says Anthony Townsend, an N.Y.U. professor who runs a network of 141 free access points called NYCwireless. Even Brilliant keeps his home Wi-Fi network open, and is happy for his Mill Valley, Calif., neighbors...
...expense, it had to build 20,000 access points across America. These access points have to be as secure as Fort Knox and support Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs (think of a VPN as a solid, encrypted tunnel of data in the middle of any signal). Free Wi-Fi rapidly loses its appeal when you realize those home users could potentially take a peek at the data on your laptop as part of the bargain...
Cometa recently inked a cunningly symbiotic deal to test Wi-Fi in 10 McDonald's outlets in Manhattan. If the test works out, Mickey D's 30,000 U.S. locations will provide the kind of footprint in the heartland that Cometa needs. McDonald's is interested not only in better serving road-warrior diners but also in the savings to be had from a network where everything down to the milkshake machine's maintenance schedule can be accessed at a moment's notice. The company has Wi-Fi in Australian, Japanese, Swedish and Taiwanese restaurants...