I’ve got my office torn apart for remodeling, and I haven’t had my computer hooked up for about 48 hours. I can hardly believe I haven’t started frothing at the mouth. We don’t have television or cable either, so we’ve been nicely disconnected for the past few days.
At any rate, it is a beautiful day here in Western Springs, so I’ve been riding my bike around to various places, getting errands done and working on an article. I’m sitting outside of the library now, slurping up some wifi. Yum!
Speaking of Western Springs, getting a signal is going to be a heck of a lot easier in this town soon. We’re going to be one of the first suburbs to have free wifi in our downtown area (and adjacent park). While this makes me happy as a citizen, as a librarian I’m perhaps slightly disappointed that the library won’t be the only provider of free wifi in town. I once considered starting a library initiated wifi project in town, but I felt that there were more important things to be doing with our time and money. It is just too bad we’re not involved in some way.
On the bright side, many more people will be using wireless devices, so I’m sure our network will get more use. Good timing that I have my “What is Wireless?” class scheduled soon.
Now I just have to figure how to install a signal amplifier on the access point (pringles, anyone?) closest to my house to I can stop paying the telco for a landline I never use.
Comments
Trying to imagine what the sound of wifi being slurped would really sound like, but what keeps you hanging on to the landline? I’m at the same crossroads, not worried so much that I wouldn’t be able to dial out on my cell in an emergency or have a VOIP meltdown, but there’s some nostalgic tie to having a regular phone in my living space. Maybe I could slowly taper off (disconnect the cord first and leave the phone as an objet d’art?)
Lovin this post.U capture some tech and that feeling of the first NICE day of spring. THX
i’ve read about this happening in various communities, and two issues interest me that haven’t been addressed in my VERY light reading. First is the privacy implication of having all sorts of personal information, browsing habits, etc. in possession of a municipality/state/whatnot. Second, in most cases, government provides only when the private sector cannot provide adequately, safely, securely, blah blah. But with internet access, it seems that the private sector is doing a decent job already.
Beatrice, I keep my landline because w/o it I can’t have DSL. I could ditch both DSL and the landline and go the cable/cable modem route, but I think I prefer the former.
Steve, I like to think of government service as “group buys” we pay through taxes. For instance, it doesn’t make sense for everyone to buy a bodyguard, so we go in together and have a police force. Same with roads and other parts of infrastructure.
Regarding free (or close to free) wifi, I’m not so sure that the private sector is so good at providing it. It is unlikely that the stores in town would come together and provide wireless. And it doesn’t make sense (well, only to TMobile and Starbucks) that everyone in town would buy their service. It doesn’t have the coverage that this Western Springs initiative will have. (That just made me realize how much ISPs must hate these projects.) Now, the funny thing is that the private sector is actually still going to be providing the wifi. It isn’t like the villiage is going into the ISP business. We’re just using the government as a buying agent.
The privacy issue is a huge one. I wonder what the TOS will be for the service and how secure it will be against l33t pranksters.