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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Department: May 2006
What Price Freedom?
Shedding light on surfing the Internet away from home
Story by Don Lipper
For the cubicle-bound office worker, sipping lattés at a coffeehouse or reclining under a tree while working on a laptop is a seductive fantasy, a little slice of heaven. Unfortunately, technological reality can be hell.
In theory, surfing wirelessly away from your home network should be a breeze. But as any seasoned road warrior will tell you, roaming agreements in the wireless world have enough strings attached to strangle you.
Wi-Fi is almost everywhere: in Starbucks shops, in airports, in parks. The only problem is that you face a mix of free and pay networks, and most pay networks don’t have roaming agreements with each other. So if you shelled out $39.99 a month for access to T-Mobile hotspots and find yourself in a Boingo Wireless coffeehouse, there’s no way to MacGyver Internet access using Dixie cups and a gum wrapper. You’ll have to shell out the daily or hourly rate. A per-day rate of $9.95 is standard, though many firms charge more.
Capitalism’s great virtue is that when the market has a problem, there’s money to be made providing a solution. Enter El Dorado Hills-based JiWire, a worldwide directory of 100,000 wireless hotspots.
The JiWire Web site’s coolest feature is that it displays all the wireless networks at a specific location. Another cool feature is SpotLock, a downloadable piece of software that includes a constantly updated copy of the JiWire directory so you can find hotspots in a strange town. The software also allows users to surf securely via JiWire’s virtual private network.
While the directory is free, the encrypted VPN service costs $39.95 a year. Why pay for VPN? Is your computer really in jeopardy? Yes. Or in the words of Dirty Harry, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”
JiWire was founded in 2003 by Bay Area refugees who worked at CNET and spotted a hotspot trend. By connecting the dots, they came up with a strong business plan for what would become the Yellow Pages for hotspots.
In those days, searching for Wi-Fi spots had an unsavory Peeping Tom flavor to it — guys with laptops would drive around neighborhoods hunting for unprotected wireless access points. These electronic voyeurs even developed “war chalking,” symbols written in chalk on sidewalks noting network identification, signal strength and other information about open-access points.
JiWire is a little less of a guerilla operation. “We take verified public hotspots intended for public use,” says David Blumenfeld, JiWire’s vice president of marketing. “These are guaranteed to be available during a location’s business hours.”
In addition to selling SpotLock, JiWire makes its money via advertising on its Web site and licensing its directory to other companies.
Today, more than 1 million people use JiWire. Customers include AvantGo, CNET Networks, Forbes.com, iPass, PC World, USAtoday.com, Wired.com and Yahoo!, among others.
JiWire.com has also been named one of the 50 coolest Web sites by Time magazine.
JiWire is growing as wireless Internet increases everywhere. According to the company, the number of worldwide hotspots grew 87 percent in the last year, from 53,779 in 93 countries to 100,355 in 115 countries.
Crossing the 100,000-hotspot Rubicon signals a global trend that is just beginning. “We’re starting to reach a mass market,” says Blumenfeld. “The business traveler with their laptop was the early adopter, but now we’re starting to see other devices — PDAs, cell phones, gaming devices [and] digital cameras are all becoming Wi-Fi enabled.”
All you poor, tired, huddled masses yearning to surf free — liberty awaits you.
Though 15-person JiWire has shown adaptability in the Wi-Fi marketplace and has “millions in revenue,” according to Blumenfeld, there is a potential storm cloud that may rain on its parade. Crawling out of the lab, Wi-Max promises wireless Internet access at miles-long ranges.
“Honestly, I think Wi-Max is a lot of hype,” says Blumenfeld. “It may be coming, but it is far away now. When it is deployed, it will handle the ‘last mile’ problem in rural areas where a fixed line into the town center isn’t economical. But if it is fully deployed in five to 10 years, would directories become obsolete? Maybe.”
Another threat to the hotspot model is free municipal Wi-Fi, which is sprouting up from Philadelphia to San Francisco. A pilot network is unfolding in Sacramento.
In September 2005, NeoReach Wireless was chosen to design, deploy and operate a citywide wireless network. According to NeoReach, the proposed network will initially cover Sacramento’s downtown, Old Town and state Capitol areas — about 10 square miles — and will grow to cover other areas of the city in 17 phases.
Pilot deployment will take place in a 4-mile square grid that stretches from Cesar Chavez Plaza Park to the City Hall complex. Unlike independent hotspots, the NeoReach mesh network interconnects with other access points to a shared main Internet connection. Mesh networks can be slower than independent networks and can receive more interference from other Wi-Fi spots than independents do.
“The pilot project allows us to do technical trials with the city mesh network,” says Michael D. Johnson, director of field deployments for NeoReach Wireless’s Sacramento office. “This should take 18 to 24 months to build out.”
The free network will provide the speed of a 56K phone modem. Although the details haven’t been worked out yet, it will probably offer two free hours a day. You’ll have to pay for more hours and increased bandwidth.
Your final choice for roaming with your laptop will cost you about $70 a month. Most major carriers — Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and Cingular — offer wireless data plans using various types of third-generation digital networks.
The most important way to evaluate which data plan is right for you is to look at carrier data maps. Although you can get a 56K-modem performance on some networks now, the really high-speed cellular networks are being rolled out slowly. After you check out the big four’s coverage maps, you have no choice but to try them out for yourself.
The good news is that 2006 will be the year of major wireless Internet deployments. All you poor, tired, huddled masses yearning to surf free — liberty awaits you.
