Online Media Cultist

London gets free WiFi!

People of Pasadena, I beseech you: who will rise up with me to demand reliable Internet access?

In light of the Internet troubles that plagued me for so many months (things seem to be better over the last week or so, fingers double and crossed!) this GigaOM piece covering the dream of “100-megabit-per-second broadband connection” really struck a power chord.

Apparently, in order to move toward such an advance, the President has to take action soon. Knowing how proactive Mr. Bush has been on science and technology during his tenure – stem cells, the Mars (lack of) initiative, and so on – I’m sure we can expect that old series of tubes to start jamming with hyper speeds any minute now.

Meanwhile, I keep waiting for the Google Overlords to come on down to Pasadena to get the free wi-fi flowing.

It was only earlier this week that I had achieved my version of a productivity nirvana in my apartment. After many months of frustration and terrible Internet connectivity issues, the bad times seemed to have been resolved and the sweet sweet wireless router was back in business, as I wax on about here in a piece lovingly titled “WiFi, Internet Connection Back, Life Is Good.”

And so it was, but it was not to be happily ever after. I woke up at 5 am on Thursday and noticed the connection was out. By tonight it was back on the phone with Speakeasy and new talk about setting timeframes for yet another service visit and a mythical “vendor meetup” between Covad and the phone company.

The long descent into madness began with intermittent connectivity issues with my cable broadband provider, Charter Communications, last summer. Six months later, I finally pulled the plug and moved onto Speakeasy, a highly recommended DSL provider.

I’m really at my wits end about what to do next. I’ve heard scant little about “air cards” that can pull some kind of wireless connection off a cellular phone network, and the little I’ve heard hasn’t been overwhelmingly positive. Other than that, I’m seriously considering attaching a long piece of string to an aluminum can and swinging it wildly toward the sky while petitioning the Internet Lords for forgiveness.

Unfortunately, this online media cultist ain’t much of a hardware guy (just ask my wife when it’s time to fix something around the house!). Anyone have any suggestions? I’d be very grateful, and it’s likely that there are many others who are experiencing ISP troubles as well.

Google, in partnership with EarthLink, will provide free WiFi service for the city of San Francisco. This may well be a landmark development in lowering the digital divide and allowing that much more access – rich and poor, majorities and minorities – to the Internet. I think it’s great for those lucky San Franciscans who can happily tell their overpriced ISP to shove it, and it’s good for the Internet in general (and of course Google knows this: more people online equals more Google searches, etc.).

It’s also good for the continued development and maturation of what Richard Florida dubbed The Creative Class. Cities that offer free WiFi service will do much to attract the young, the hip, the creative, the geeky, the artists and entrepreneurs and aspirers who breathe life and business and spending into the urban. Because the cost of founding a start-up is so much lower than ever before, it’s no longer necessary to park yourselves near the venture capital stronghold of Silicon Valley. Therefore, San Francisco is very smart to offer free WiFi to all of its inhabitants. Start ups will mimic Forrest Gump and say, “Free WiFi? Great, one less thing!”

San Francisco’s offering of free WiFi to its citizens will likely compel other cities who consider themselves cutting-edge and tech savvy to do the same. Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, San Jose, New York, and Washington DC are now certainly on notice to step up. Free access to the Internet by more people will inevitably foster more innovation. The acceleration of Thomas Friedman’s flat world within the United States will ignite more competition, which will cause some to fail but will create winners who will provide better services, create better products, write better software, and enable the best forms of collaboration, communication, creation, and interaction in the world.

Now, on a much more self-serving note, it’s time for the Powers That Be (I have Season Five of Angel on in the background just now, as luck would have it) in Pasadena to beg and worship and plead with Google/EarthLink to bring some of the free WiFi love to Pasadena. One day I’ll write the long and sorrowful tale, but suffice to say that I haven’t had a reliable Internet connection in four long months now. Months 1-3 were spent wrangling with Charter Communications over my increasingly intermittent cable broadband connection. I finally dumped them for DSL, only to encounter problems stemming from some other hell dimension. Hopefully yet another visit from the phone company will straighten out whatever needs to be straightened. I’m kicking off 2007 with optimism, at any rate.