One of the enlightening aspects of traveling to so many big cities over the past year has come from being able to observe various localized attitudes toward the mainstream use of technology. Which is a fancy way of saying that people look at me differently when I type away on my laptop in public places depending on what city I’m in. I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country (South Florida), but even here in 2007 I find other patrons looking at me like I’m an alien when I plop my laptop onto the dinner table in a restaurant, even one that offers free WiFi. And yet I can remember sitting in a cafe in downtown San Francisco all the way back in early 2000, pecking away on my then-new clamshell iBook, and I was far from the only one (although a lot fewer of the other laptops were Macs in those days).
In fact, when I sat down for lunch in a San Francisco “free WiFi” restaurant after Apple’s Showtime Event six months ago, there were so many dozens of nearby open wireless networks available that I had trouble figuring out which one belonged to the restaurant I was eating in. There’s just an assumption that you’re going to be toting a laptop, I guess. Not so much the case around here, where you’ll find instances of a fast food restaurant inexplicably offering free WiFi while the sit-down restaurant next door to it fails to do so. But why should the latter bother installing access if none of the patrons are going to use it?
The same thing holds true when it comes to iPods, of course, but the circumstances are different. Visit a walking city like New York City and you’ll find so many iPod users on the streets that they’re considering legislating their use in crosswalks. Around here there might be just as many iPod users but since everyone’s tucked away into their cars it’s a bit trickier to gauge things. I know that I see a whole lot more iPods in stores, restaurants, and other public places down here than I ever did in my time up in comparatively rural Central Florida, where during those three years I managed to see a grand total of one iPod that didn’t belong to me or a family member.
I suppose it’s all just a matter of taking time for new technology to filter its way into mainstream use in areas that aren’t necessarily ahead of the curve. But I find it curious that nearly eight years into the wireless revolution, pervasive public WiFi has still yet to become anything more than a far-off vision, even in those places that are indeed ahead of the curve. Restaurants, hotels, convention centers, airports. Oddly enough, the small town I left did try to install a city-wide WiFi network, as of now it’s still not usable. I guess no one considered the fact that the signal was going to have to travel through walls into people’s homes. You wan to use city wireless, you’ve got to sit on the porch with your laptop, I guess.
Like it or not, I think the future of pervasive wireless, at least in the near to mid term, will rely more on businesses and public places collectively flooding the area with so much signal strength that you can almost make your way through a big city without losing network access. The feasibility of such a scenario will likely come down to each establishment being willing to not lock down their network with passwords and access codes, which so often make the networks sufficiently cumbersome as to be useless even to those who are supposed to be the ones using it. I know it goes against traditional corporate thinking (and makes their lawyers apoplectic), but leaving those networks open is the key to making it all work. Let me tap your network when I need it, and I’ll patronize your establishment when I can.
The reason I bring all of this up now is the realization that even though the iPhone is capable of surfing the internet across cellular networks, anything beyond the lightest of websurfing is going to leave you wishing there were a WiFi source to tap into while you’re sitting in a restaurant or even walking down the street. The quest to find publicly available WiFi, a task long confined to laptop junkies like me and the relative handful of current smartphone users out there, is about to go mainstream once the iPhone becomes as mainstream as the iPod is now. That won’t happen right away, but I have to wonder how much further the march toward pervasive WiFi will have advanced by the time the general citizenship is suddenly demanding high-speed access for their iPhone in every public place they find themselves frequenting.
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