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December 13, 2003

Lessig and Doctorow, Truth and Fiction, on Swiss Wi-Fi

By Glenn Fleishman

Cory Doctorow, true-life rights defender and novelist, exposes a chunk of his work-in-progress, while pointing to Larry Lessig, true-life true-intent-of-copyright defender, who rants: Cory’s notes the anti-openness and generally confusing nature of using Wi-Fi in Switzerland, a country that revels in expense in general, in an excerpt from his newest work-in-progress, based on his experience in Switzerland.

He points to Lessig’s post about ironically having the worst possible time connecting at the World Summit on the Information Society. In both cases, they’re talking mostly about a single provider, Swiss Telecom, which doesn’t appear to want “drop-in” users.

I was recently in Whistler, B.C., a ski resort community with a township around it, where there are now two competing ubiquitous Wi-Fi networks. Curse my luck, the condo unit my wife and I rented could barely receive the signal of both—not strong enough to be useful. But both services also required out-of-band connections: you had to go to some store or kiosk to purchase specific periods of time. So instead of Wi-Fi, I skied, and apres-ski, I went to Internet cafes, where I spent a total of about US$8 over three days for a couple of hours of access.

Posted by Glennf at December 13, 2003 10:02 AM

Categories: Unique

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