Mark Evans

Looking for Wi-Fi in All the Wrong Places

Ever wonder how much you take being online for granted? With broadband access, wireless home networks, Wi-Fi and, now Wi-Max, it’s so easy to be wired at all times. So, it’s interesting and, I guess, troubling when you want to be online but can’t do it easily. I found myself in this predicament recently when attending a meeting in Montreal. Sitting in a hotel conference room, I fired up iStumbler (a free Wi-Fi network discovery tool) and my Firefox only to discover that all the networks in the area were password-protected (whatever happened to sharing!?). Meanwhile, the hotel connection was $20/day, which is outrageous given I only wanted an online fix for a couple of hours. The same thing happened at the Montreal airport where there’s no such thing as free or cheap Internet access (or competition for that matter). The silver-lining within my quest for online access was Porter Airlines, which offers free Wi-Fi access within its lounge at Toronto Island Airport.

And: Thinking about it a little more, the search for Wi-Fi challenge reflects the need among many people to be continually connected. Look at the intense relationship people have with their Blackberrys, and the need to constantly check e-mail to see if anything “urgent” (or, for that matter, anything) has landed in their in-box. When people are un-connected, they somehow feel naked. This explains why people check their e-mail on vacation, partly because they want to see if anything is happening, and partly because they’re scared of facing hundreds of e-mails when they get back to the office. A friend, who wasn’t on e-mail (Blackberry) or the Web for most of a two-week vacation recently, commented that he felt liberated. We may not be too long from the days when always-on, all-the-time people have their friends/family do a “connected intervention” so they rediscover the off-line world.