Free Wi-Fi hotspots in coffee shops, cafes, hotels, airports and much more have sprang up all over the place in recent years. In fact for about 8 years now this has been one of the most advancing technology services in the America retail and food service markets. Reading this article from diggs.com called Wi-Fi wants to be free seems to hopefully be a new growing trend in the Wi-Fi service and that is giving this service away from FREE. Currently most major coffee shops like Starsbucks have charging a monthly fee for using Wi-Fi in their cafes. But this seems to slowly be changing. Now the Wi-Fi service is being giving away like a free TV or free toaster when buying other goods or services.
Also technology companies such as Google wanted to setup free Wi-Fi all over down-town areas of cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago. Of course these plans are still being discussed there is no question that this trend could slowly become a kind of standard for most major cities wanting to participate in giving their citizens this service.
Starbucks just announced early this year that it will be dumping it long time partner T-Mobile and going with AT & T. With this transition Starbucks offers free service to (i.e the first two hours) any Starbucks card holder.
Now of course they are still slowly trying to get you to pay for this service but in a more passive way. I think that as time goes on we will see more and more free Wi-Fi services and in turn will have advertisements within your browsers has you use their services. This could be a great upcoming market for advertisers and many companies could be jumping on this bandwagon.
Issues with offering these free Wi-Fi service came right from the top of our government when the house of representatives on December 12 approved a bill that if anyone offering free Wi-Fi must report any illegal activities such as child porn, hacking and other illegal uses. Overall this growing trend in free Wi-Fi is done right I believe could be a wonder service for America. This could create more different internal services that use Wi-Fi (i.e. phone over Wi-Fi) and will advance more of these kinds of technologies. I look forward to seeing how the future of Wi-Fi in America advances.
Stay tune for some wonderful technologies dealing with our current Wi-Fi technology.
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