COMM 352: Wifi Everywhere

WiFi is such a ubiquitous term in our society, everything is advertised for it's WiFi capability these days. Of course, now that we have recievers of WiFi signals everywhere, people naturally want routers everywhere.

Hey, Hot-Spots are great. There's enough hot spots in even a small town that you could, with relative ease (and a small investment), you could use WiFi to eliminate your need of cell-phone service. If there was Wifi everywhere, then BOOM, free phone and internet for everyone.

But free WiFi everywhere won't work.

"ANGUS! Hot-Spots work and they're free!"

Let me tell you a little story. Last Summer, I spent a weekend in Indianapolis. Downtown, there's a WiFi network run by the state of Indiana that is accessible anywhere you go. It's called the State Public Wifi, and I used it like crazy.

It was slower than dial-up and told you upon connecting that it's DNS blocks any and all Dating, Piracy, or Pornography related websites. Pretty much what you'd expect in the blocking department, but nonetheless, it was a domain block, so if you knew the site's IP Address, you could still connect.

A few things people don't realize: The government would make a crappy ISP, The more people use a service, the slower it is, and radio waves are finicky bitches.

The government being the ISP solves the piracy issue. Right off the bat, they can block access to any material that allows people to commit crimes. They don't have to fight a middleman. Free Public WiFi would not contribute to piracy because they would block you from pirating.

The speed of the service is something easier to see: Our area has two choices: Comcast or Frontier. Both are massively faster at about 3 am. In the case of Indiana's WiFi, so many people were connected to it, it took the Google homepage a full minute to load. This is because the bandwidth sucks.

That leaves a radio-wave sized hole in the Free WiFi issue. Right now, start downloading a movie. Now put a microwave in the same room as your computer and heat up a Hot Pocket. Unless your router is only a few feet away, you'll notice the slowest download speeds ever.

This is due to the fact that the radiation from your microwave is stronger than the radiation from your router. Now imagine trying to get that free for everyone WiFi anywhere near a power plant, fast food place, or radio station. Hell, go sit in the parking lot of McDonalds and try to get their free WiFi during business hours. Untill you get into the building, you'll notice speeds that would make Dial-Up look AWESOME.

So, you know, maybe try to think of a way to overcome that radiation, make the bandwidth big enough to sustain the whole country, and preserve our right to steal from rich people, then we'll talk about free WiFi.