Free wireless broadband?

The answer: yes. As if that’s not the best part, it’s a trend that appears to be expanding, from Athens, Georgia to Calvin‘s backyard in Portland, Oregon.

The premise is simple: use wireless Internet technology to give broadband Internet access to everyday folks with a portable computer and an 802.11b interface card. This enables people to walk down the street and have Net access, without paying for diddly. Is this the future of mobile computing?

While I believe this kind of stuff will become the norm eventually, I’m happy to see it happening so soon. Enterprising individuals should make sure this kind of thing goes in the right direction: Internet cafes that allow users to sit outside in the sun, city web-kiosks for pedestrians to stop at when they grab a drink from the water fountain, and computer gaming tournaments held in the park with big-screen displays of the action. The possibilities, as they say, are endless.

While range and penetration are two issues still being worked out, so long as one is outdoors, the network can extend quite far with strategically placed nodes. Even this obstacle, however, may soon become moot, as wireless connections may extend as far as 20 miles from a root node, making cable and DSL service nearly obsolete.

Wireless connections are definately the next big thing, especially if they become pervasive enough to overtake land-lines as the primary source of Internet access. The only consideration, then, is bandwidth availablility, which may not be so easy to come by if free wireless catches on. But for now, this is definately a trend I want to see keep growing.

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