I want my free WiFi

I've always thought this big hooh-hah about WiFi networks being this huge phenomenom was a crock of ****. Okay so WiFi is this huge phenomenom, but WiFi in airports, WiFi in cafes and WiFi everywhere else is never something a company will make big money on. The reasons are manyfold, but the two big ones are the lack of universal coverage and the lack of universal access to what coverage there is.

Even more important you need both coverage and access simulataneously - if there is not WiFi network then you're hosed, and if there is and you have to fork over another bundle of cash then you're also hose. People want WiFi in 95% of places they would want it, plus to have a single billing and a single all you can eat fee - and a low one at that! Okay in the USA we don't exactly have universal cellphone coverage, unlike say Europe. But its as good as for the vast majority of the population and we only really have two major networks GSM and CDMA to deal with roaming. WiFi isn't anything like the coverage, not even 1% and there are literally dozens if not hundreds or thousands of providers who don't talk to each other to allow access to each others WiFi networks.

While the popularity of WiFi has meant almost any place there is Internet access may provide WiFi you could jack into surreptitiously for free (like your neighbors!) they are usually not ones intended for public use. This happened to me recently when I stayed in a timeshare that happened to be directly over the management office that had its entire network open and unprotected for my free use. As new technologies for easily configuring security on home WiFi networks become ubiquitous even that option will disappear and free access will be restricted to those who deliberately open up their WiFi networks for free.

In fact I think providing WiFi hotspots as a business model will go away within two to five years as WiMax and 3G eat its lunch. Sudenly people will wonder what all the fuss was about just like with that other marketing hype anomaly - WAP.

The enlightened souls are already realizing that trying to make money from WiFi is basically a waste of time, and its counterproductive to actually charge people for accessing it. Free WiFi should instead be used as a feature to attract customers rather than as a direct revenue stream. This is exactly what an article from the Seattle Pi is saying. Its only a matter of time before Starbucks decides that free WiFi is the hip new thing, and all others major chains like McDonalds will follow, eventually even airports will realize its a public service to offer free WiFi hotspots.

By that time WiMax will be enabling entire communities and cities to regain control of their data networks and offer internet to vast areas for free or very low cost. And ultimately its clear that those laggards the mobile phone carriers will eventually figure out their role in life is to provide a vast and all encompasing wireless internet dial tone to the entire country. Yes, the bandwidth they offer will always lag behind what is available by wired connectivity to our homes, but basically by the time it reaches current broadband rates (a reliable 1.5Mbps download) it will be enough for most of what people want to do. Yeah, thats not enough to stream HDTV but it is more than enough to stream high quality video, audio and transfer a lot of data real fast. In fact I would go as far to say that the next revolution will be for a big drop off in DSL usage in the five year time frame as many people start just hooking into their cellphone as their primary and even only network connectivity.

Cable a la carte - they're still not getting it

Wired News has an article today about cable a la carte, that is being able to subscribe to and hence only pay for the channels you watch. The big cable companies apparently don't want this and are arguing against it strongly. The prime reason they cite is that many channels will simply wither and die because they don't have enough viewers to attract advertising and pay their way. Currently, they say, the big network channels they carry in their service bundles help subsidize the smaller guys until they grow large enough to attract more advertising. If forced to offer a la carte the big cable companies claim it will actually drive up the cost of the average bundle of services - people will have to pay more for less!

Personally I simply don't buy it. The reason is that it is usually the smaller independent channels that people will dig into their pockets to view - if only they had the chance. If the subscriptions paid for these channels went directly to them then there wouldn't be a need for expensive advertising to make them viable. I believe the true problem is that currently the big TV networks are charging the cable companies an arm and a leg to carry their programming. This means that as much as popular channels might be subsidizing small ones they are also driving up the overall cost of packages.

What is happening now is that the big networks are pressuring the cable companies to resist opening up their systems to competition that might drive the price down. As viewers become more selective about what networks they subscribe to the amount of money available to TV networks will fall and their need to raise more advertising revenue will increase. That's exactly what they wont be able to do since advertising revenue is basically proportional to viewership of a channel.

I saw that cable networks are simply being bone headed about the whole a la carte deal. They can have their cake and eat it if only they let viewers pay be the amount of TV they actually watch. Not just the number of channels, but the actual hours of TV. Right now I don't subscribe to cable and so long as I have to pay for something I'm not watching I never will. For instance I wouldn't want an a la carte cable package if I had to subscribe to Fox just to get The Simpsons once a week. I'd sooner poke my own eyes out, but if I could just pay $0.50 to watch The Simpsons every week then fine. While I don't have an ethical objection to subscribing to HBO, and many other channels I still don't want pay for programming I never view.

Basically the current non-a la carte cable packaging system is not economical efficient for the consumer because those who only watch a few channels and a small amount of programming are subsidizing those who gorge on many hours of cable every day. That's a win-win situation for the cable companies, but a lose-lose situation for many viewers. Therefore its clear to me that the cable companies position is anti-competitive and backed by TV networks who don't want viewer choice and competition to have more influence on their revenues and squeeze them out of their cushy subsidized positions in cable packages.

Lets reinvent the wheel - not!

Has anyone else notice the great excitment about the ability to share a computer between multiple users? Here's one article from Wired that complains how HP wont be selling its four user Linux system in the USA.

Well excuse me but I find all this fuss about sharing machines most entertaining. At the risk of sounding like an old timer I would like to point out that in my first job out of college there were three HP machines shared by the entire engineering staff of twenty or so. No this wasn't back in the old days of punch cards and core memory either. This was a mere fourteen years ago in 1990 and believe me these were not super powerful machines with tons of memory and disk. They were just low-end HP Unix boxes with a processor no more powerful than your average 486 (think before Pentium!), maybe 16Mb of memory if we were lucky, a few hundred megs of disk storage, and a bunch of keyboards and screens (also known as "terminals") dangling off them.

Lets face it, most people spend most of their time doing mundane tasks like reading and writing email, reading and writing text documents and surfing the web (well back then there was no WWW so it was mostly doing FTP and reading USENET). None of these require massive amounts of horsepower and even real software development such as compilation and debugging could occur in parallel with such activities.

A long time ago the Unix world recognized the utility of giving users a way to share a machine and have a graphical user experience and hence networked windowing systems like "X" were developed. From that the concept of a low power but graphical "X terminal" connected to a more powerful shared server was introduced. These days an X terminal could be a very low power machine - even a humble $200 PocketPC could act as one and equivalent computing power of an X terminal could easily be built directly into a regular LCD monitor/keyboard combination for very little. This would have more than enough utility for web browsing, document reading and editing, software development and indeed, almost all common domestic and education uses except gaming and high end graphical visualization.

I really wonder why we have to go through this "invention" of the notion of sharing a computer again? Just bring back the X terminal and apply todays cheap hardware and economies of scale to make them a $200 item, or at least no more expensive than the screen and keyboard attached to them.

Thunderbird and Firefox are go!

I've spent about a week now using both Firefox 0.9 and Thunderbird 0.7 - the separate browser and email components from Mozilla. Of course I've been a long time user of plain old Mozilla, pretty much since version 1.1. However I had been noticing increasingly infruiating random crashes when using Mozilla, usually at particularly inopportune moments. I decided that separating the mail program from the web browser was perhaps a good idea and since the functionality is virtually identical it looked like a good idea.

So far the experience has been pretty good. No crashes at all and no significant loss of functionality except that the Mozilla web page composer is not a part of Firefox. Therefore I either have to fire up Mozilla just to edit an HTML page or hunt down a new HTML editor. I've started looking at Visicom Media's AceHTML and CoffeeCup's HTML editor but haven't exactly been over impressed with either so far. I know both have heaps more functionaility than Mozilla's editor but if I'm going to pay for a tool I'd like it to be good.

Of the niggling problems I've discovered in switching to Firefox and Thunderbird I think the most significant are related to tabbed browsing and search integration. I can no longer middle click on a link inside an email and have it open the link in a new tab in Firefox - you can only do a regular click and have it open a new window. Neither can I enter an URL and hit control-enter to have it opened in a new tab. I don't like having a separate input box to enter web search terms - the old Mozilla method of just entering them into the URL area and scrolling down in the input box worked great. The upside is the separate search input area supports multiple search engines so I can now search directly in Google, IMDB, Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, Amazon etc. etc.

Overall I think Firefox is an improvement over Mozilla for the average user - it has far fewer options to bother with and they are presented in a more manageable way. For instance the privacy features are easily managed from the options dialog and a single "Clear All" button press will erase all your history, cookies, forms, passwords and cache that have been stored away by the browser.

Likewise Thunderbird is nice clean email client that I would recommend to anyone over Outlook or Outlook Express. If you look at the Thunderbird homepage you would be forgiven for thinking it was still in early development, or certainly not as mature as Firefox. However my experience is quite the contray - its basically just all the mail functionality of the regular bundled Mozilla product. As such its very stable and I haven't experienced any problems with it. The only unpleasentness I observed as that migrating your Mozilla mail profiles to Thunderbird isn't automated yet. You actually have to go and dig around in your Windows "Documents and Settings" directory and copy stuff over. However this was very straightforward once I found the instructions. Strangely migration from non-Mozilla mail clients is supported out of the box.

For anyone suffering from spam I can say I've been using Mozilla spam filtering features for about a year now and after a few weeks of training they work really well. If you have a folder of spam somewhere its easy to open it up and Supporting multiple mail accounts and multiple identities for each one it meets my every need.

While writing this I noticed that there is now a Thunderbird 0.7.1 release that supports saving a profile on an external USB device. That's great - now I can keep all my profile and mail etc. on a keychain and take it with me. This should also work for Agent J so she can move between work and home computers and still enjoy a full client based email experience instead of having to use web mail in one place or another. However it does make backing up of one's keychain of vital importance!

Now all I need from Mozilla is a decent address book and calendar tool - I still fire up Outlook to get this because its functionality for these is second to none in my humble opinion. Outlook contacts come prepopulated with so many fields I've never needed to add a single one. If someone can package together an LDAP server and a address book and calendar client as functional as Outlook I'll be more than happy to pay a few bucks for it.