The Way That They Use It

Standing in the rain on a chilly October day in Manhattan's Bryant Park, struggling to keep my laptop dry as I try to make a data connection, I'm struck by the question of whether this is really what Wi-Fi is good for. Waiting in line at a Starbucks in Chicago's River North neighborhood as the barista froths the milk for my grande skim latte, I spot the store's T-Mobile HotSpot sticker and have a similar thought.

Stranded by a winter storm at Detroit Metro Airport, needing to file this column with my colleagues in Chicago, I find an application for which Wi-Fi would be very useful. But I can't sniff out a hot spot, so I can't make a connection.

Wi-Fi is an innovative wireless access technology that works like a charm, but only in very specific places and for very specific applications. And the way it is currently being deployed isn't likely to turn many corporate types — the Holy Grail of customers for any application, wireless or wireline — into Wi-Fi converts.

Take New York: Although grass-roots organizations like NYCWireless — which maintains Bryant Park and other hot spots — are promoting the Wi-Fi way by putting up public access points, the efforts of commercial service providers are still very contained. The New York location directory on the Web site of Boingo Wireless, for example, lists mostly hotel lobbies and cafés — some of which include coverage qualifiers like “rear portion of deli.” The only site that seems to have enterprise potential is the McGraw-Hill building in Manhattan, and that listing contains the ominous caveat “overlooking the sunken courtyard in front of the building.”

T-Mobile's Wi-Fi coverage currently is limited to select Starbucks locations and airports, some of which feature coverage in terminals and some limited to American Airlines' Admirals Club lounges. I imagine many corporate road warriors have achieved the rank of Admiral, so T-Mobile may be on to something there. Once they arrive at their destinations, however, few of those business travelers will want to sit in the lobbies of their hotels to get high-speed access. And other than students and the perpetually sleepy, how many people really want to do their work at Starbucks?

Rather than hanging access points in coffee shops, wireless service providers should be unwiring conference rooms, convention halls, libraries, universities and other haunts of the enterprise-oriented. Either that, or they should be fostering the development of applications that would make Wi-Fi matter to a mass-market audience.

In this month's cover story, Ed Gubbins profiles the boy-wonder founders of Pinpoint Networks who built a platform that could revolutionize mobile data application development. Wi-Fi has yet to attain widespread success as a connectivity method because — like its mobile data cousin before it — it is a format without function suitable for the general consumer. Until some innovative geniuses discover Wi-Fi's killer apps, its purveyors should stick to the enterprise.