Wednesday, March 05, 2003

Keeping an eye on things, by cellphone - New York Times The killer app for cellphones may not be viewing the person you're talking with, but viewing remote scenes of public and private places. Logitech's new Mobile Video service includes a program that lets users view images from Webcams around the world. ''Peering into cities and buildings hundreds or thousands of miles away, right now, in real time, is a giddy, heady rush,'' claims the Times. One obvious application is inspecting traffic conditions before a drive, but people eventually may use the service to keep tabs on their homes and properties. Corante

3:09:51 PM    

I think he¹s right. The university where I teach, the University of Tennessee, has a high-speed wireless network that covers the entire campus. Now some of the bars and restaurants and coffeeshops nearby are catching on — one even has a big sign advertising ³Fast Free Wireless Internet² as a way of luring customers. Right now it¹s a big lure — sort of the way air-conditioning was fifty years ago. But soon it will be ubiquitous...

Wireless Internet access is cheap and easy to provide (I have it at home, and so do countless other Americans), and as people get more and more used to it, spaces that don¹t have it seem less and less appealing. I think that Doc is right, and that customers will come to expect it over the next few years. In some places, they already do. Kind of like toilets.

LameList disagrees:

As a consumer, I think this would be great. But it is lame-fully short-sighted and naïve for several reasons. First, wi-fi is cheap and easy at the home level — once you have the broadband installed. But providing wi-fi means first the coffeeshop has to upgrade from their twisted-pair POTS dial-up used by their point-of-sale system to broadband access. Then they install wi-fi as a means of access. Saying "it's cheap, I have it at home" is a grossly lame simplification that forgets the need to install broadband in the first place. Starbucks is installing some nifty fat data pipes for their wi-fi. Perhaps if they installed a skinnier DSL line, their costs would not be so high, but then level of service would be reduced.

Lame or not, it'll still happen. Plenty of hotels, coffee shops, libraries, universities and whole cities are already providing free wi-fi for the same reason they provide street lights and public restrooms. None of those are free either — except to the users who expect them for exactly that price.

So here's your take-away quote: Think of pay-fi as the Net's equivalent of the pay toilet.

3:05:27 PM