Thursday, May 15, 2008

The WiFi Factor

Dial
I discovered something a few days back; I actually go to restaurants and hotels with free WiFi over those without it. Especially since the 16GB iPod Touch has replaced the Palm Tungsten C on my belt, WiFi is a major factor in my decisions. Perhaps more interesting though is that I've actually stopped eating at restaurants because they don't have free WiFi, and I won't book a room without free hotel WiFi. Unfortunately I've been burned many times by the WiFi at hotels, but it has to have it so that I can at least check my e-mail and log whatever caches I might have found. I don't see the municipal WiFi panning out (we have the Wireless Oakland project around the apartment and its completely unusable unless you're within a couple hundred feet of the access point, line of sight, no cars or walls in the way), but when might we see more free access in businesses? I can say that free WiFi might be the ONLY thing that would make me go into a Starbucks again.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We finally enabled WPA on our wireless here, if you can imagine. Sure, the network is for clients (among others), so even if it was a great password, everyone would still know it. But its progress, right?

-J