Our Unreliable Wireless Future

Wi-fi is now nearly a given. My mother can depend on finding a Starbucks from which to check her email even when traveling to a backwards town like Reno, Nevada. Cafes without wireless are the exception, not the rule, and they don’t last long.

But there’s a catch: more availability begets more demand begets competition for service on a medium with limited bandwidth and low “guaranteed” QoS. Or, in English, there’s a pretty good chance you’re not going to be able to get on the wireless the next time you go to your usual coffee shop.

Scenario: you sit down with your beverage, pop open the laptop, and discover that the cafe’s hotspot is down. There are a couple other networks to choose from, but one of them is encrypted and the other has a such a weak signal that you can barely grab a couple emails before giving up. You ask the person behind the counter, but they have no idea how the shop’s wireless setup works. You wish you’d brought a book.

Scenario: you sit down with your beverage, pop open the laptop, and connect to the cafe’s hotspot just fine. You even get a few web pages. Then the network slows to crawl. You look around and see some jerk with a Dell downloading god-knows-what off Kazaa or some other P2P spyware delivery system. Other laptoppers look around, puzzled, and curse under their breath. There’s no social etiquette for asking strangers to be good public network citizens. You really could use that book.

Scenario: it’s five years from now, and city-funded networks are the norm. Except, nobody who has to get anything done uses them. By the time most cities cut through all the legal tape put in place by telcos, they realized they had funded network architectures that were inadequate and woefully out of date. Your laptop barely supports the crappy old protocol that the city’s wi-fi cloud uses, and the network is rampant with worms and bored kids launching their first denial-of-service attacks. You’d sit down to just write that fucking book, but Word is now a web application. You weep.

I’m hamming it up, obviously, but my point is that bad social infrastructure limits the potential of growing technological infrastructure.

Now where’d I put that book?