Begin forwarded message: From: Glenn Fleishman <glenn@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: June 14, 2005 1:43:57 PM EDT To: dave@xxxxxxxxxxSubject: Re: [IP] more on Some Cafe Owners Pull the Plug on Lingering Wi-Fi Users
Joseph Lorenzo Hall <joehall@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But lately, the subject of Wi-Fi - specifically, the cafe's move to cut back on the free Wi-Fi connection it provides for patrons' Internet use - has been impossible to avoid. "It's distracting," said Jen Strongin, a co-owner.A good friend, Sean Savage, was quoted in this story and found this story (and a few others in the same vein) to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Specifically, this slight trend to throttle WiFi in cafes is wholly insignificant compared to the background movement of cafes in general offering free WiFi... where the equilibrium will end up, no one knows. More at Sean's blog:
I'm the author of that NY Times story and earlier coverage. You're misquoting Sean's blog entry. He wrote:
"The other articles, particularly the New York Times piece, were more balanced and better informed about this."
I "broke" this story on my own Web log, wifinetnews.com, and then wrote about it for the NY Times. At no time did I suggest (as the Financial Times did) that this is a trend or backlash. I wrote about this particularly as one of those interesting unintended consequences of multiple kinds of behavior coalescing into one place.
The cafe exists to sell coffee (or that's how it manages to exist), and the owners founded it to provoke discussion and create a kind of environment they would like to spend time in. The epiphenomenon of they're adding Wi-Fi changed the culture of the cafe enormously.
It's not a trend in the sense of thousands of cafes trying limiting Wi-Fi, but it is what I would call a mini-trend: a small subset of cafes are obviously struggling with the laptop crowd. I didn't have room in this article to write about the dozens of systems that let cafe owners meter free (or fee) access.
No trend, but definitely interesting to a large audience given the response to the various articles that have come up and then discussion on Slashdot, local forums in Seattle, and the general cafe trade reaction.
-- Glenn Fleishman seattle . washington unsolicited pundit . glennf.com columnist . seattletimes.com/practicalmac daily wireless networking news . wifinetnews.com ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/