Word: franciscos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What the geeks get in return is nothing short of astonishing. If you live in San Francisco and can see San Bruno or any of 16 other nodes in the home-brew San Francisco Local Area Network (SFLAN), you can stick your own wi-fi antenna on your rooftop, angle it in just the right direction and receive a clear, high-speed Internet connection--even from the other side of the city. The cost? Less than $100 if you buy your own parts, which can include an empty Pringles can. After that, you pay nothing. Nada. Zippo. Not a dime...
...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...
Warchalking began a couple of years ago in London, and has since spread to the sidewalks of Seattle, New York City and San Francisco. Wireless guerrillas walk or drive around a city with wi-fi--enabled laptops, sniffing out wireless networks. They leave hieroglyphs that, to the untrained eye, look like graffiti. The symbols not only alert those in the know to a hot spot but also reveal how fast the network is and whether it requires a password. No password required for me--hence the open-faced moons...
...company that is developing applications for the construction industry, says she spends six hours a week at Starbucks. She's constantly on the road meeting with clients, and whenever she needs to go online she just drops into the nearest Starbucks anywhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco. "I'm a lot more efficient now," she says, since she can reply to e-mails during the day instead of waiting until she gets home...
...more serious threat to Starbucks' plan is the competition from free wi-fi--the crazy quilt of free wireless networks springing up in San Francisco, Seattle and other high-tech cities. Starbucks customers have been known to hop on a free Internet node and bypass the store's paid service entirely. "Why pay if you don't have to?" says Kevin Lawrence, 28, a software-industry entrepreneur, who spent hours typing on his laptop but hadn't bothered to buy anything during a recent visit to a Starbucks in Manhattan...