Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Between a Nightmare and a Rip-Off

Years ago you could just go on vacation or travel and nobody would bother you. The inconvenience of communicating just wasn’t worth the effort, and short of sitting next to a fax machine, receiving office documents didn’t happen. As a result, no one expected you to check in regularly or stay “real time” with office stuff. Even early cell phones didn’t change it much. The phone transceiver was either bolted into the trunk or you had one of those 3-W bag phones that were anything but portable. Worse yet, short of being in downtown Manhattan, you’d never find a cell tower close enough to make a call anyway. 

Of course, in a few short years, a whole lot has changed. Cell phones today are suitably miniaturized, highly productive, and always connected—unless, as I know from experience, you happen to be in Vermont. ;-) More importantly, today we have the Internet, e-mail, web cameras, VoIP, web sites, etc., etc., and the aggravation/benefit ratio that has made us all decide that we can’t live without cell phones is quickly extending to include a whole collection of digital communication and entertainment devices. 

Unfortunately, along with all this technological progress, life itself has changed. Today, you can’t just leave the office and forget it. You are expected to keep up with e-mail, download office documents, and stay current with work decisions. Enjoy your vacation, but make sure you have a laptop and Wi-Fi connection along with that beach chair.

Ubiquitous Wi-Fi is somewhere between a nightmare and a rip-off. In my experience Wi-Fi connections are either very costly or virtually free, and you can never count on what you’ll find. It’s one thing to stay in touch with the office. It’s quite another to spend $1,000 on a dozen different IP networks in airports and hotels in order to do it. And, while war driving sounds like an adventure, having a police cruiser pull up behind you while you’re sitting in a suburban neighborhood is very embarrassing. “Sorry, I was just hacking this guy’s Wi-Fi.” ;-)

A recent trip to Newport, Rhode Island pointed out the insanity of it all. Unlike my experience in Vermont (I affectionately refer to VT as a black hole for communications), Newport was a nightmare of overlapping Wi-Fi. The timeshare condo where we were staying had Wi-Fi, so I thought I was all set. It took only a couple mouse clicks to realize that it cost $3 per half hour! You have to be kidding. Most of the providers like T-Mobile in Starbucks charge only $10 a day. This was ridiculous for such a weak signal that I’d probably lose right after submitting my credit card information.

From one end of the condo to the other, I picked up weak signals on four different Wi-Fi networks, all of them open and all of them pay-for-use. There was my timeshare, a Newport citywide network, a general Newport hotels third-party network (probably from the timeshare across the street), and one for the Marriott hotel behind us. It wasn’t hard to see $500 a month using any of these. Forget that. As I walked out to the car with the laptop to check other options, I suddenly picked up a signal from Panera Bread about 300¢ down the street. The sign-on page seemed to say their Wi-Fi was free—my kind of place. I guess now it’s Wi-Fi and specialty breads. Hey, I’ll take free Wi-Fi with pastrami any day.

Obviously, expensive Wi-Fi is the hotel’s answer to losing the profit center and $5 per telephone call they used to get. While some progressive hotels include Internet with the room, obviously a captive market in a tourist trap isn’t conducive to bargains. It isn’t that I won’t pay for Wi-Fi; it’s that I refuse to pay minimum service charges to a dozen different IPs to get more than local spot coverage. Like the outrageous roaming charges for early cell phones, the dichotomy between over-priced Wi-Fi and free hot spots creates a real dilemma.

The situation isn’t going to get any better the closer we get to the 802.16 initiative. This is part of the proposal to create a Wireless Metropolitan Area Network, and it uses a mix of licensed and unlicensed frequencies (as opposed to unlicensed ones for 802.11) to provide area-wide communication at DSL communication rates. Typical installation involves running a fiber-optic cable to a local area transceiver (similar to a cell tower), where it becomes a wireless competitor to phone and cable companies by supplying wireless Internet, video, and phone services.

For me, Wi-Fi is now a necessity, but I need a better long-term solution than over-priced commercial providers and maybe yes/maybe no war driving. I want either one commercial ISP that covers everyplace at a reasonable cost, or so many free hot spots that I don’t care who the providers are. Finally, 802.16 really makes Internet service in your car a potential reality. (And you thought making cell phone calls while driving was dangerous.) I just hope it isn’t like early cell phone usage, where a 25-mile trip that passes though three different cell phone service territories results in three different daily roaming charges added to the bill.