Friday, February 7, 2003

It strikes me that the market will move towards paid WiFi only where people have very constrained choices and their business is paying for the service (airport lounges, some hotels). The great expansion will come from the recognition that this is a good way to attract business where people have idle time - laundromats, coffee shops, bookstores, auto repair shops, etc. [...] Initially businesses will install it to gain business and, at some point, it will be necessary - just like cleaning the shop windows, paying for interior design and other secondary features that attract and keep a good customer trade. The metered services counter that they offer a superior product. People who are testing services indicate this just isn't the case. Many of the freenets offer better net with less hassle and the sponsornets have it in their best interest to offer a quality link.[Steve Crandall's Surf Report 2.0] I stayed at several hotels with paid net (wired and wireless) last year. Most paid services use very nasty routing tricks. In particular, they redirect port 25 to their own SMTP servers, in the name of "convenience" for those who don't know how to reconfigure their mail client. Except that this breaks my mail client setup, which uses authenticated SMTP over SSL for wireless security authenticated SMTP forwarding (our campus wireless net blocks unencrypted POP3, IMAP or SMTP so that passwords do not fly around in the clear). The first time it happened, I wasted much time trying to figure out why I could not reach my SMTP servers, and the hotel staff was of course clueless. Besides the hassle of reconfiguring, I don't particularly want to entrust delivery of my outgoing email to a hotel server, which is unlikely to be well maintained. In contrast, my favorite campus cafe, Intermezzo, offers free straightforward WiFi as well as Peet's coffee and a variety of nice snacks. A winning combination. 9:23:43 AM