The free Wi-Fi hot spots may have benefited more than the fee spots during Intel’s free Wi-Fi day: Nigel Ballard reports that the Starbucks in downtown Portland had 40 unique logins while Portland's free Personal Telco hot spot downtown had 176 unique logins. He also says that everyone in Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square, where Intel put on its event for the day, was an Intel employee. They apparently were bussed in from the Intel factory to make the event look crowded.
Portland's free wireless group wasn't the only one to benefit from Intel's unwired day. In Austin, a couple of free Wi-Fi groups got together to put out a press release noting that every day is a free W-Fi day in quite a lot of locations.
"We sent [the release] as far as San Antonio, but it seems the whole country has picked it up," said Rich MacKinnon of the Austin Wireless City Project and the founder of Less Networks. He has seen the press release listed on some of the large stock market sites under Intel news.
MacKinnon thinks that most people will choose to use free hot spots when they're available. But travelers might use the fee spots mostly because they might have an easier time finding them. In an unfamiliar city a traveler might find it easier to locate the nearest Starbucks than a local independent cafe with Wi-Fi.
But locals in towns like Austin will likely long be attracted to the free sites, not only because they're free but because they're usually operated by independent shops. "We love our independently owned businesses. We resent it any time a Hard Rock Cafe or something like it opens," MacKinnon said. "We'd rather see Wi-Fi pop up in these small places."
I think that Wi-Fi will become so popular, that the tragedy of the commons will take place, and a lot of the free spots will become so overcrowded that there will be some users that are subscribers to paid services just to get away from an access point that has it's DSL line swamped by 15 users banging away at it. You can see the beginnings of this at some of the free cafes in Manhattan.
I seriously doubt that a small cafe owner will pony up for the cost of the increased bandwidth to support a ton of users. There will be a balance of free and paid, according to the rules of supply and demand.
At my spots, on OUD, I had at least seven people pay for access when it was free. Go figure. I'm happy to take their money.
What is OUD? And how do you have a site that is both free and paid at the same time? Does the paid subscriber get higher bandwidth? Curious!
I would be interested to know how Nigel knows that T-Mobile only had 40 unique logins. I understand that T-Mobile does not usually release this info.
t-Mobile told Intel folk at the square, who in turn told me.
Intel were having a devil of a job using their corporate VPN through the t-mobile hot spot, but the cobbled together free PTP node passed their IPsec traffic just fine. Strange days indeed!
Cheers Nigel
I would have to agree. The US is being watched carefully with regards to Hot spots. THe Uk has obviously taken it up with great enthusiasm. I can't wait till it spreads across every country.