Word: wi-fi
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...looking for those networks--known as wardriving, in homage to Matthew Broderick's wardialing in the movie War Games--got a boost when the descendants of ham-radio enthusiasts figured out that you could pick up a much stronger signal by welding an empty Pringles can to your Wi-Fi card...
Then came the habit of warchalking--which began in London and spread around the globe--in which wardrivers would mark the presence of free networks with a strange hieroglyph--parentheses in reverse order--in chalk on the sidewalk for all to see. "The beauty of Wi-Fi is that it is so decentralized," says Anthony Townsend, an N.Y.U. professor who runs a network of 141 free access points called NYCwireless. Even Brilliant keeps his home Wi-Fi network open, and is happy for his Mill Valley, Calif., neighbors...
...Despite the expense, it had to build 20,000 access points across America. These access points have to be as secure as Fort Knox and support Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs (think of a VPN as a solid, encrypted tunnel of data in the middle of any signal). Free Wi-Fi rapidly loses its appeal when you realize those home users could potentially take a peek at the data on your laptop as part of the bargain...
Cometa recently inked a cunningly symbiotic deal to test Wi-Fi in 10 McDonald's outlets in Manhattan. If the test works out, Mickey D's 30,000 U.S. locations will provide the kind of footprint in the heartland that Cometa needs. McDonald's is interested not only in better serving road-warrior diners but also in the savings to be had from a network where everything down to the milkshake machine's maintenance schedule can be accessed at a moment's notice. The company has Wi-Fi in Australian, Japanese, Swedish and Taiwanese restaurants...
...time and technology are on Brilliant's side. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers--those geeks who came up with the name 802.11--tentatively announced the creation of a new Wi-Fi standard earlier this year. It's called 802.16a, or more memorably, Wi-Max. It can comfortably cover a square mile, meaning it would take only 49 transmitters to blanket San Francisco. As Brilliant says with a grin, "Now it gets interesting." If you can cover entire cities with wireless Internet access, you suddenly have a very cheap alternative to cellular networks. But even Wi...