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Today's focus:  Free Internet: A 5-minute walk?

By Scott Bradner

If the Alliance for Downtown New York is able to realize its 
plans, free Internet access soon will be much easier to come by 
for anyone in lower Manhattan. The experience in the rest of 
Manhattan bodes well for easy-to-find Internet access and hints 
that the alliance is just hastening the inevitable, but does not 
bode well for wireless hot-spot service providers.

According to its Web page <http://www.downtownny.com/>, "the 
Alliance for Downtown New York is the Business Improvement 
District (BID) serving the area south of Chambers Street." The 
group wants to "enhance the quality of life in lower Manhattan 
by creating a community for people to live, work and play."

According to an article in the April 4New York Times, the 
alliance's latest way to enhance the quality of life is to 
install Wi-Fi access points in a number of public parks in lower 
Manhattan and to open them up for free to anyone who wants to 
use them. TheTimesquotes an alliance vice president as saying 
that the group's aim is to make free Internet access available 
within a 5-minute walk anywhere in lower Manhattan.

Admirable as the alliance's work is, it seems to be just 
continuing a well-established trend of making free Wi-Fi 
Internet connections available in Manhattan. By last fall, the 
Public Internet Project <http://publicinternetproject.org/> had 
found almost 10,000 open Wi-Fi access points in Manhattan and 
theTimesreports that this number is now up to 13,000. The 
density of these access points matches the demographics of the 
population of Manhattan - so it can be a lot longer walk than 5 
minutes in some parts of the city, but all you have to do is 
turn on your computer in other parts.

This trend is quite good news for people like me who travel a 
lot and like to check their mail (too) frequently. But it's real 
bad news for companies trying to make money by selling Wi-Fi 
Internet access. Companies such as T-Mobile (which provides 
fee-based 'Net access in more than 2,000 locations around the 
country, including Starbucks 
<http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0320starbucks.html>, Borders 
bookstores and airports), and Cometa Networks 
<http://www.nwfusion.com/go2/0414gibbrad2a.html>, which has a
5-minute walk in the city or drive in the country plan (see Has
the rainbow landed yet?
 <http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2002/1216bradner.html> ).

T-Mobile just reduced its access fees by quite a bit, but I do 
not know if that was because its price was wrong from the 
beginning or because competing with free offerings is getting 
harder as more free access emerges. ( a research view of the 
difficulty of pricing services like this 
<http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~parkes/pubs/online.pdf> ).

I would be remiss if I wrote about Wi-Fi and did not mention 
security <http://www.nwfusion.com/go2/0414gibbrad2b.html>.
Actually, it's Wi-Fi that is remiss in the security department.
The only security is that which the user brings by employing
secure Web or encrypted tunnels (that is, VPNs). Real wireless
security seems around the corner, but the best strategy is to
assume it's not there and bring your own.

Disclaimer: "Around the corner" for a place with Harvard's long 
history could still mean "quite a while," but the above is my 
view - not Harvard's.
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Scott Bradner

Mark Gibbs <http://www.gibbs.com/mgbio> is a consultant, 
author, journalist, and columnist. He writes the weekly Backspin 
<http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/gibbs.html> and Gearhead 
<http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/gearhead.html> columns in 
Network World. Gibbs is also co-conspirator of the Vitally 
Important Information 
<http://www.vitallyimportantinformation.com/> Web site.

Gibbs can be contacted at <mailto:webapps@...>. Press 
releases to <mailto:pr@...>.

Bradner is a consultant with Harvard University's University 
Information Systems. He can be reached at <mailto:sob@...> 

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