Back From Vacation, Enjoying Broadband Again

During the past month, my family did an extended weekend mini-vacation to the Washington Coast, a week home, and then a week traveling around Ohio catching up with family and friends.

As a traveler with a laptop and a burning desire to periodically get connected to the Internet at broadband speed... I was largely relegated to very slow dialup via hotel PBX in the evenings.

What I conclude from this is that the opportunity for entrepreneurs to set up Wireless HotSpots and HotZones is simply enormous.

During the Washington Coast trip, we visited Ocean Shores, WA, a very nice resort community with no public access Wi-Fi acccess that I could detect except for the new Linksys Access Point installed at the Ocean Shores Library. They are very friendly - I just walked in, opened my PowerBook, and connected. Other than that... no "cyber cafes", no Wi-Fi equipped coffee shops, and none of the hotels advertised high speed Internet access. It appears there's ample opportunity for a Wireless ISP in Ocean Shores, WA to enable Wi-Fi HotSpots and hotels there.

My hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio was different. The local Wireless ISP there -
Coastal Wave Wireless (whose founder Tom Whitted is an old friend, and one of my heroes for having gotten Coastal Wave Wireless up and running in Port Clinton), has a strong signal in the downtown and so one would only need to find a place to park or sit downtown to access the Internet with a Coastal Wave account. Unfortunately my PowerBook couldn't quite access Coastal Wave's system, and because I was there to visit and have fun, I didn't take the time to troubleshoot the connectivity problem.

We spent several days in Columbus, Ohio and connectivity options were better there, exept in the hotels we stayed at. One prominently advertised "Free High Speed Internet Access", so I thanked my wife for her wisdom in booking this hotel. We got a reasonable room, got settled in, and I looked for Wi-Fi signal or Ethernet jack and couldn't find either. I called the desk and the clerk cheerfully informed me that I wasn't in one of the rooms that actually had the "Free High Speed Internet Access". So once again I was relegated to s-l-o-w dialup. My connectivity options in Columbus were reasonably good - Starbucks and Kinkos were readily available.

We visited the campus of Ohio State University, and I was absolutely amazed at the dearth of (apparent) Wi-Fi access on High Street which is the Eastern border of the OSU campus and the prime "walking distance" concentration of bars, restaurants, and stores. I saw no advertisements, and detected no Wi-Fi activity.

If I were living in Columbus (again), the heavy concentration of off-campus apartments East of High Street I would seriously investigate doing Neighborhood Area Networks using high-power outdoor Wi-Fi APs to offer low-priced, high-speed Internet access to the itinerant student population, letting them purchase their own "customer premise equipment" and paying via PayPal or other electronic means via a Wireless HotSpot type system. I've worked up a very short outline of a business plan for such a service; contact me if you'd like to discuss it.

I formed a number of conclusions from this trip as I saw BWIA mostly from a (potential) user's perspective:

The potential for Wireless HotSpot services is truly enormous; it has not been satisfied to any great degree. There are hundreds of local and regional venues that could act as Wireless HotSpots

Resort communities need to look seriously at community-wide Wireless Internet Access systems; in an area like that where all the hotels need to offer Internet access, it makes sense to spread out such an infrastructure investment.

Looking at the off-campus apartment situation at Ohio State, and extrapolating... just doing highly-localized Wireless HotZones in such a dense and savvy customer base would likely be quite lucrative.

There's a narrow window for the wireless telephony companies to sell their 2.5G/3G data services to those that really want such always-on, everywhere connectivity.

Some of the best bets for finding Wireless HotSpots outside of major cities are marinas, campgrounds (judging from the adventures of the Hoy family at www.wirelesstrips.com
), and truck stops.

Dialup for demanding Internet users such as myself, simply isn't adequate. It does... barely... beat total lack of connectivity. My usage of IMAP email, and such things as graphics-intense web pages timing out, my telephone voice mail messages that are emailed to me taking ten minutes to download all add up to dialup no longer being useful to me.

I'd like to thank the good folks at PCTEL for sending me one of their "WiFi Seeker" units. The WiFi Seeker is a small "keyfob" that's earned a spot on my keyring despite the presence of two automotive key fobs of equivalent size. The WiFi Seeker is reasonably accurate, economical on battery life, and a heck of a lot more convenient for finding Wi-Fi access quickly than continuously opening up your laptop when you're browsing for Wi-Fi Internet Access. I recommend the WiFi Seeker.

Steve Stroh

Copyright © 2004 by Steve Stroh. This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.