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Fourteen months ago, after mulling a list of defunct Wi-Fi start-ups, Schell brought AT&T, IBM and Intel together to discuss a jointly funded $30 million Wi-Fi network blanketing 50 U.S. metropolitan areas. He dubbed the venture Project Rainbow. Each side could see the benefit: IBM sold approximately $1 billion in Wi-Fi services in 2002, Intel was looking for a way to get into the wireless chip game, and AT&T provided the communications backbone for 8 million road warriors. But as IBM's representative John Boutross remembers, the talks were initially very static: "These large...
Enter Larry Brilliant, who had been doing a little consulting for Intel. Brilliant knew the benefits and pitfalls of Wi-Fi, and he was accustomed to working with start-ups. (In the years since the Well, Brilliant had created 14 networks including his own failed Wi-Fi company, AirZone.) The pace of the discussion frustrated him. "It was harder to negotiate a treaty between these three elephants than between India and Pakistan," he says. Brilliant should know. He once brokered a subcontinental smallpox treaty in six weeks. Talks among Project Rainbow's founders over the nondisclosure agreement alone dragged...
...what about those 11 million U.S. road warriors: How can they be sold on Wi-Fi? Starbucks, in partnership with T-Mobile, had already launched its in-house Wi-Fi network, which you could pay for by the minute or subscribe to by the month. The San Francisco-based Surf and Sip network offered a similar service in independent coffee houses. If the typical road warrior turned out to be a fan of Grande Double Lattes, Cometa could be sunk before it started...
Another big question: What kind of threat is the free-Wi-Fi movement? In major cities, many home users are leaving their networks open--either as a public service or, in more cases, accidentally--meaning anyone can use those networks to surf freely without a password. The practice of 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...