PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column
JANUARY 8, 2004
For love not money:
How WhyFi can turn hotspots into a real industry
By Robert X. Cringely
WiFi -- 802.11b, -a, and -g wireless networking -- is the big Internet success story of this decade. It's successful because it is simple, cheap, and unlicensed. And that lack of a required license is taking WiFi places nobody ever expected it to go. How could a local area networking technology, for example, compete with and even threaten such entrenched (and licensed) technologies as mobile and wired telephones and even broadband Internet? It's not because WiFi is so good but because it is so free of restrictions that we can turn it into whatever we want. And in this case "we" means just about anyone. But the big money lately seems to be going into WiFi hotspots and hotspot aggregation. And as promised last week, I think the current aggregators are going about it all wrong.
JANUARY 8, 2004
For love not money:
How WhyFi can turn hotspots into a real industry
By Robert X. Cringely
WiFi -- 802.11b, -a, and -g wireless networking -- is the big Internet success story of this decade. It's successful because it is simple, cheap, and unlicensed. And that lack of a required license is taking WiFi places nobody ever expected it to go. How could a local area networking technology, for example, compete with and even threaten such entrenched (and licensed) technologies as mobile and wired telephones and even broadband Internet? It's not because WiFi is so good but because it is so free of restrictions that we can turn it into whatever we want. And in this case "we" means just about anyone. But the big money lately seems to be going into WiFi hotspots and hotspot aggregation. And as promised last week, I think the current aggregators are going about it all wrong.
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