As the owner of a laptop with an internal modem who likes to get online whenever and wherever possible, I appreciate the city making wifi hotspots available downtown. But let's not pretend this is cutting-edge. Free wifi hotspots are sprouting up everywhere in the country, even at McDonald's. The speed is somewhere between dial-up and DSL, not quite broadband, and connectivity is likely to be iffy in spots. And, as usual, when government decides to invest in something, it's a little bit behind the curve. The coming thing now is the air card, which is:
installed into laptop computers and allows a user to access the Internet from anywhere there's cell phone reception, including at home, driving on the interstate or sitting downtown.
It will be a couple of years before the low cost and wide coverage of the air cards are sufficient to make them a popular choice. By then, hotspots will be all but obsolete, and something new will be coming down the pike. Still, $50,000 isn't a bad investment by the city for what Downtown Improvement District President Dan Carmody rightly calls a "little step forward."
