Word: wi-fi
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...telling this story, Stalter likes to punch up his patter with wireless-industry slang. When he talks about bringing wi-fi to an area, he says he's going to "paint it!" or "light it up!" But the reality isn't that dramatic. Though they sound like a secondary weapons system from the starship Enterprise, the phased-array antennas are actually large, featureless beige-and-gray nubbins that sit unassumingly next to AC units on rooftops. It's almost impossible to pick them out of the skyline, though there are six of them in downtown Spokane, along with 12 smaller...
...tend to think of information as a liquid; we talk about how it flows through conduits--wires and cables--or gathers in pools in hard drives. But wi-fi turns information into an all-encompassing vapor that seeps into places it has never been before, and it has added an extra dimension to sleepy old Spokane. Elise Robertson is a 10-year veteran of the city's police force. Her squad car has a full-fledged wireless PC in it--the guts of it are in her glove compartment--with a touch-screen monitor stuck on her dashboard...
Meanwhile, a local commercial ISP called 180 Networks had been studying ways that urban wi-fi could attract more people to Spokane's downtown area, which was in need of a little revitalizing. As Starbucks has learned, people tend to hang out more if there's free Internet access to be had. They check their e-mail. They linger. And while they're lingering, they spend money. Light bulbs started appearing over people's heads all over town. Why not make downtown one big wireless zone? The city geeks, the Vivato geeks, the 180 Networks geeks and a local business...
...every city cloud passes the cost along to the consumer. In Austin, Texas, local businesses maintain 84 free wi-fi hot spots networked together, and the companies split the cost between them; in theory, they make the money back by attracting bandwidth-hungry customers. "I like the idea of the technology," Richard Mackinnon, president of the Austin Wireless City Project, says of Spokane's HotZone. "The problem is more with the finances behind it. When you have the Zone, you're reduced to a single player: one big person has to pay for everything. That person is going...
Will people actually pay for wi-fi? Can Vivato pull money out of thin air? Maybe not with prepaid cards, but, as Stalter says, the technology is way ahead of the applications, and over time alternative revenue sources are going to come crawling out of the woodwork. I thought of one myself, when I got back from Spokane. Parking in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., is so tight, it took 45 minutes of circling the block before I found a space. I spent that time doing a thought experiment: What if Vivato lit up my neighborhood with wi-fi? Then...