Wi-fi isn’t as popular as some would have us think
June 21, 2005 by Mike Wendland
This tends to confirm a trend I first saw and reported on in Michigan a few months back: The public as a whole doesn’t seem to be as excited about wi-fi as the tech industry would like them to be. Orlando Pulls Plug On Free Internet Service
Just the other day, I visited a local UPS Store that has had wi-fi since last fall.
“How’s it going?” I asked the manager.
“Still waiting for the first user,” he told me.
My wife works at a public library in a medium income working-class suburb of Chicago. The Library installed public wireless access about 3 months ago. 6 weeks after the installation, I took my laptop into the library to check out the wireless access, only to discover that it was not configured properly to allow users to access the Internet. No one had mentioned that to the staff, most likely because no one had attempted to use it in those 6 weeks.
The library has since taken care of the problem, but I have yet to see someone (besides myself) using the wireless access at the library. Part of this is due to a lack of advertising on the library’s part — there are no signs mentioning that they have wireless access.
On the other hand, I see public wireless as an important service. I will be looking for it and dependent on it for the next two weeks while on a bicycle trip across the eastern half of the United States.
If you need wireless access, just ride down any residential street. I just got a tablet and put NetStumbler on it. On the 6 mile round trip to my parent’s house, I discovered 70+ networks. Going through the residential neighborhoods it was finding one at nearly every other house. Of course the bulk of them were unsecured.
Why would I want to go to Panera Bread or Borders to get on the Internet when I’m paying $50 a month already to use it at home. :\
As someone who travels for a living, I can tell you that WiFi is important enough to me that I am willing to pay $20/month to get this service from T-Mobile. I think that someday this will be a free service or the price will go down to a few dollars, but until then, this is the way I can access email and the internet while on the road. My local library also offers free WiFi access, but I didn’t know about it until quite recently and that was by accidently discovering it.
Well, it seems pretty clear to me that people don’t want to “hang out” at the UPS store. It seems like a silly place to offer wi-fi at all.
Most people using wi-fi outside the home seem to pay thru the nose at Starbucks or jump on the free access at Panera. When I go to lunch at the Panera down the street, I routinely see a half dozen people surfing.
People use the hotspot at our local Starbuck’s all day long. That’s because Starbuck’s is a place where people. If I had to choose between my local library and my local Starbuck’s, a cup of coffee will always win. And who wants to go to a UPS store to surf the web? I clicked on the link about Orlando stopping free internet service. If you read the story you quickly understand that the location of the hotspot was the problem. You have to put the hotspot where people want to be. Now if you have something like wi-max that allowed people to connect wherever they want, people will use it. Location, location, location.
Wi-fi is actually quite big. Sure, a UPS store is a dumb place to have Wi-Fi; where are you going to sit? However, many coffee shops offer free Wi-Fi (to compete with Starbucks which makes you pay). Another place where you get Wi-fi regularly is a hotel. I go on tour 6 weeks a year and almost every hotel has Wi-fi in the rooms or at least in the lobby. As for government-sponsored Wi-fi, I’ve only experienced the Wi-fi in Riverside, CA. It was cool because the hotel I stayed at there wanted $10 a day for internet, but I could pick up the city’s Wi-fi if I went down to the hotel lobby. Also, when you get onto the city’s Wi-fi, there was a coverage map, so you could figure out whether or not you’d get signal if you went to a different part of downtown.