Word: wi-fi
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...looking closely, it's easy to miss the wi-fi antenna atop San Bruno mountain just south of San Francisco. There are a couple of dozen TV and radio broadcast towers, each about 300 ft. tall, surrounded with chain-link fences and electromagnetic radiation warning signs. The wi-fi antenna is a solitary 18-in. plastic stick that radio engineer Tim Pozar stuck up there on his day off. If it disappeared, fewer than a hundred people would notice. "It takes geeks like me, putting up antennas, to make this work," says Pozar...
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...
...this sounds like a grownup version of schoolkids connecting tin cans with string for a science fair and dreaming of putting the phone company out of business, well, that's because it is. Proponents of free wi-fi like Pozar believe that paying for Internet access is as dumb as paying for a radio signal (which is, of course, exactly what wi-fi is). Already their tin cans and string have scored successes from Manhattan to Milwaukee. Small retail outlets such as bookstores and coffee shops are starting to get with the program too. They find that giving away bandwidth...
...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...
There's the rub--one that pay-for-service wi-fi providers are quick to point out. Such companies as Comcast and SBC grumble about free wi-fi services the way parents complain about their teenagers, calling them unreliable, irresponsible, spotty and insecure. They may have a point. "A company providing only free access would defy the laws of economics," warns Mike Short, senior vice president of engineering at the Silicon Valley wi-fi firm Gric. He and others believe that somewhere along the line, somebody is going to have to pay for the connection...