June 22, 2004
Hot on the Trail of Free Wireless... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
I'm hot on the trail of free wireless. And I'm not alone.
But let me back up here. Anyone who's bought a laptop in the last year, in all likelihood, has wireless. This means that whenever you're in a hotspot, you can sit at peace with your laptop and be happily hooked up to the Internet, and frequently it's a place where no one knows your name and won't pop in to change the course of your day.
Now, I've been aware for some time that I can find wireless out there in the world, but it always seemed to come with a price tag. In my neighborhood, McDonald's will give you a free hour if you buy a Big Mac, but the calories alone are discouraging, not to mention the potential for exposing my digital baby to French fries or my brain to nearby kids downing Happy Meals. I might think differently if my own boys were toddlers again, and I was doing my "contract programming overlaid with being a mama" bit, but those days are in the past.
Or there's Starbucks who has teamed up with TMobile, but you've got to sign up with TMobile, and I'm just plain tapped out when it comes to paying for yet another monthly service.
--
Then a friend rolled into town, and told me to bring up google and type in the words "free wireless San Francisco." It's easy to guess what happened next.
Within a click or two, I was looking at a map of my town, all 7 miles by 7 miles of it, and there they were. Coffee houses in every neck of the woods all providing free wireless Internet service.
We packed up our laptops and hit the road. Within 5 blocks of my house we found a quiet little place that I had totally overlooked before. With trendy music wafting in the background and the bohemian ambiance of coffee house chic, I had downloaded a busy week's worth of audio files before I was halfway through my caffe mocha. I had my cell phone, and I was online. For the moment, nobody really knew or cared where I was physically. I knew I'd found a brand new life.
I spent the next week scouting half a dozen more places. If the FBI is tracking terrorist groups through coffee houses, my name has to have popped up on their screens.
--
There's no doubt in my mind, there's a new social order afoot. I can just look around and count the laptops. If I see 5 people in a cafÈ, 4 will have laptops. If I see 10 people, I'll count 8. One place is just a few steps from old Mission Dolores. Another is filled with Russian immigrants. One house appears to draw artists, actors and musicians, while another looks to be people cruising for a date.
The advent of personal computers may have sent us home to work, but anyone can get cabin fever. In all these places, there's enough human contact to know you're among the living. People are having good times and bad, stresses and triumphs. You see couples cozily nesting their laptops on impossibly small tables, and singles cradling their computers while giggling into their cell phones.
I used to wonder how these places stayed in business. I don't wonder any more. I personally am giving them my business, one caffe mocha at a time.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
Back to Five Minutes List
