Subject: [NEXTEL-1] The "Wi-Fi Boom"

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 11:22:25 -0500

The Wi-Fi Boom
By ADAM BAER
The New York Times
December 12, 2002

ON a brisk autumn day in Portland, Ore., Paul van Veen was soaking
up some sun as he logged on to the Internet - from a spot in
bustling Pioneer Courthouse Square. Mr. van Veen was looking for a
job, and he was surfing the Web over a free wireless connection.

These days, Pioneer Courthouse Square is but one of some 140
public spots across Portland with free Internet access using a
high-speed wireless technology known as Wi-Fi. The network of such
Wi-Fi "hot spots" throughout the city was developed by Personal
Telco, a grass-roots, nonprofit group devoted to blanketing the
city with free access points.

Portland and Personal Telco are just part of a growing national
trend. There are community groups promoting public Wi-Fi access in
nearly every large American city, from NYCwireless, which
"unwired" Bryant Park and Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, to KC
Wireless in the Kansas City area. They have been joined by
independent cafes and restaurants, apartment houses and community
centers across the country that view free, easy access to the
Internet as a draw for customers.

At the same time, subscription services and pay-as-you-go Wi-Fi
hot spots are springing up in cafes, bookstores, hotels and
airports, put in by companies like T-Mobile and smaller, start-up
competitors like Boingo Wireless and Wayport. Last week, Cometa
Networks, a new company backed by Intel, AT&T and I.B.M., said it
planned to put a network of thousands of wireless access points
across a huge swath of the nation by 2004. The result is a growing
array of options for Wi-Fi users and the emergence of a mobile
wireless culture that spans business travelers, teachers and
students, people relaxing in coffee shops and even moviegoers
waiting for the show.

All that is needed for laptop users to wander with Wi-Fi (the name
is short for "wireless fidelity") is a piece of hardware called a
Wi-Fi card - perhaps a $100 investment - and where the access is
not free, a one-time or longer-term service provider. Anecdotal
evidence suggests that most users are male, under 40 and
comfortable with technology.

The technology is, however, becoming more accessible. People who
use paid hot spots like those offered by Wise Zone, Wayport and
T-Mobile simply open their browsers to log on. Users of free city
networks like NYCwireless are asked to agree to the network's
"acceptable use" policy, and if they do, they are on the Internet
for six free hours until they have to sign on again.

Wi-Fi is also changing the way that people - at least some young,
technologically adept people - go about their work. In
Philadelphia, Yvonne Jones, a 33-year-old freelance copywriter,
moved her base of operations to a Starbucks about a month ago and
said she quickly became "a thousand times" more productive than
she was when working at home. "It's not your house, and you are
there for a specific purpose, so the 'distractions' aren't that
distracting," she said.

Frank Bonomo, who is between apartments and living with his
parents on Long Island after losing his job at a dot-com, spends
nearly every workday at a Starbucks in Greenwich Village. Mr.
Bonomo, 24, is building a freelance practice as a Web producer,
managing online advertising and message boards for design firms.
He uses an account with T-Mobile to stay in touch with his clients
by e-mail and instant messaging. "I commute here from the Island
so I can be close to the offices of my three to four regular
clients," he said.

Mr. van Veen, who is looking for work as a wireless systems
engineering manager, said he was using the public Wi-Fi hot spot
in Portland to research a "hot job lead" because the connection
was so much faster than his home connection. "At home, you
generally use a standard phone line," he said. "This downloads at
200 kilobytes a second, which is just lightning quick."

Actually, under ideal conditions, Wi-Fi offers even greater
speeds - 11 megabits per second, exceeding those typically
achieved by high-speed home connections through cable modems or
digital subscriber lines. Connection speeds slow, however, as a
user gets farther from the source of the signal, which has a range
of about 300 feet.

Ryan Palmer, a Portland-based consultant who studies
human-computer interactions, said public wireless access had
allowed him to be more efficient and enjoy himself at the same
time. Mr. Palmer, 27, was on a business trip to Austin and wanted
to sample the authentic Texas barbecue that he kept hearing about,
but he also had some work to finish. He was able to do both at
Green Mesquite BBQ, a restaurant with a recently installed free
Wi-Fi access point.

"It's nice to surf the Web and enjoy some good food," he said,
adding that the Internet connection at his hotel was so slow it
was "painful." He said: "I feel empowered. I'm not a stranger in a
strange land anymore."

It took Mr. Palmer 15 minutes of fiddling with the settings on his
laptop to get a connection at the restaurant. "I had to play
around a little bit," he said. "I'm still not confident that
someone could walk in off the street and do it."

Not everyone can. Jodi Avant, 41, who is studying for teacher
certification at the University of Texas at Austin, uses wireless
frequently on campus, where it is widely available. As part of her
program, she had to buy an Apple iBook with a wireless card to do
schoolwork and communicate with teachers and other students.

She tried and failed to log on to the free Wi-Fi hot spot at a
Schlotzsky's Deli near the campus. "I brought it here, set it up
and played around with it for half an hour," she said. But she did
not know what settings she needed and there was no help available
in the restaurant.

Ms. Avant, who lives near Schlotzsky's, visits the restaurant with
her children every Saturday. They stay about an hour and use the
wireless Internet terminals provided by the restaurant. She checks
her e-mail while her 7- and 11-year-old sons play games and her
8-year-old daughter visits sites like www.funjail.com. Ms. Avant
said she planned to keep trying to get through to the Schlotzsky's
network on her own computer. "It's a lot better than my dial-up at
home," she said. "The only downside is I can't print anything."

People who use public Wi-Fi networks have another option: they can
use the same setup to connect to wireless networks at home, at the
office and at school. Running a Wi-Fi network in an office is only
slightly more involved. Janine Kurnoff, who runs a Portland
company that trains sales and marketing professionals, has
maintained her Wi-Fi network for a year and a half. "There's a
little bit of setup involved, but less than an hour of work," she
said. "You don't have to configure anything. The computer sees
your network and picks it up."

Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a girls' school in
Bellevue, Wash., was part of Microsoft's Pioneer School program on
incorporating technology into the curriculum in 1996. Now each
student's tuition buys a Wi-Fi-ready laptop.

"There's a lot of instant messaging going on," said Diane Burgess,
39, the school's information technology manager. Ms. Burgess said
classes were no longer disrupted by cellphones, parents message
their children to arrange pickup times, and students regularly
share files for collaborative projects. "Wi-Fi lets them do group
work from anywhere on campus," Ms. Burgess said. "It's a really
freeing experience."

Beyond the hardware and software difficulties that users like Ms.
Avant have encountered at public Wi-Fi spots, there are traffic
considerations: connection speeds can slow if the number of users
on a network picks up. And some home Wi-Fi users have reported
that the systems, which operate on the 2.4-gigahertz frequency,
are subject to interference from cordless telephones and microwave
ovens. Ms. Burgess said that water, which absorbs the wireless
signal's energy much like food in a microwave oven, can interfere
with a home network and that glasses, clothes and other clutter
can obstruct the signal. "It actually helps me keep my home cleane
r," she said. "My kids keep their rooms absolutely streamlined
now."

Security is also a concern for open networks. Mark Malewski of
NexTech Wireless, a Chicago-based nonprofit group that is trying
to organize grass-roots Wi-Fi networks, said there were steps the
hot spot operators could take to help. "We have an authentication
server that tracks usage," he said. "Without that, a lot of people
could plug in an access point and share it with those who could
conduct fraudulent activity."

Security concerns will become more important as public Wi-Fi
networks spread and more people use them. Statistics on use of the
technology are elusive, but according to Gartner, a consulting
company in Stamford, Conn., the number of Wi-Fi cards sold in
North America this year is on track to jump 75 percent over 2001,
with another 57 percent gain over this year expected in 2003.
William Clark, research director at Gartner, said that the number
of frequent Wi-Fi users was expected to grow to 1.9 million next
year from 700,000 in 2002, with the number of public hot spots in
North America likely to nearly triple by the end of next year from
about 3,300 now.

In fact, this growth is responsible for casual Wi-Fi use beyond
the high-tech vanguard. Sherry Bough, 56, and her husband, Bob,
59, live at the Austin Lone Star RV Resort, a gated park with a
heated pool, a playground and a Wi-Fi network, for six months a
year to be near their children. The Boughs used to order a phone
line whenever they stayed in one place for more than a month so
that they could use their dial-up Internet connection to track
their investments, check e-mail and search the Web. Now they use
the park's Wi-Fi network.

"It's amazing how fast it downloads," Mrs. Bough said of the
network, which was installed earlier this fall and offers
fee-based service by the day, week or month. Still, she said, it
took her a couple of hours to connect the first time. "It was a
little bit confusing," she said. "To me, that's where they're
failing right now." To use the wireless network, the Boughs had to
buy a U.S.B. card for their computer and they updated to Windows
98; Mrs. Bough said they also needed to install more memory.

James Westberry, 55, is another part-time resident at Austin Lone
Star. He works in Austin, the state capital, when the Legislature
is in session, advising lobbyists for small telephone companies
like the Eastex Telephone Cooperative, where he works. He goes
home to Tyler, Tex., on the weekends.

"I have to have high-speed Internet wherever I'm at," he said.
"Otherwise I'd be at a hotel or have an apartment." He uses it to
download bills, attend committee meetings online and to check
e-mail.

Public Wi-Fi has also begun to change the way people play. Jack
Swayze, a 27-year-old technical-support worker in Vienna, Va.,
gathers with laptop-equipped friends at Wise Zone hot spots around
Washington to team up for live-action shooting games like Unreal
Tournament 2003 and Medal of Honor, which they play against other
Web "posses." "The connection is as reliable and fast as my
connection at home," he said.

At the Alamo Drafthouse North, a movie theater in Austin, wireless
access is available in the four screening halls. Tim League, the
theater's 32-year-old owner, installed the Wi-Fi access in concert
with Austin Wireless, which set up the system after he agreed to
offer it to viewers free.

Mr. League uses the network to offer Internet-based activities to
entertain viewers before movies. He is testing interactive trivia
programs and audience polling contests and expects to have one
running soon. "I've always thought it strange that the slides you
see before movies still exist," he said. "That the practice hadn't
changed in 30 years just seemed silly." He shows animated videos
that are downloaded from the Web using a Wi-Fi-equipped computer
in his projection room. "Viewers also use the Web to research
movie facts or catch up on their work or e-mail, though we ask
them to close their laptops when the show begins," he said.

Entertainment is the main motivation behind Shane Nixon's
experiments with public Wi-Fi. Mr. Nixon, 34, was trying to log on
to a Wayport hot spot at the Austin airport last week while he
waited for a flight to Bowling Green, Ky., where he lives.

A construction and maintenance coordinator who travels three weeks
a month, Mr. Nixon had been using dial-up connections while on the
road to chat with his wife by instant messaging and to play card
games with her on sites like www .mysticisland.net. He had just
installed a wireless network at home so that he, his wife and two
sons could go online at once, and he was trying to connect
wirelessly on the road for the first time. When he could not log
on, he used his cellphone to call Wayport's technical-support
number, but his cellphone battery died. Despite the technical
problems he encountered, Mr. Nixon said he would probably stick
with Wi-Fi. "I'm gone all the time, so that's a way to keep in
touch and do something together," he said.

Mr. Nixon noted another virtue of high-speed chatting. "You can
talk all night long," he said, "and you don't have a large phone
bill."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/technology/circuits/12wifi.html

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