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Wireless doomsayers muffled by hat mastication

Dr Centrino-love, Or How I Learnt to Stop Listening and Love the Hub

So I'm in a friend's flat in Bogota, desperately trying to connect to the Internet. Against all better judgement, AOL is installed on the laptop and currently failing to connect to a US number to find what local exchange dial-ups are available.

One very expensive human phonecall to AOL later, two numbers of Bogota exchanges are written on a notepad at the extremely reasonable rate of $8 a minute. They connect but aren't as keen on sending or receiving data as they are draining my bank balance.

It's hopeless, so I disconnect from the phone and sit on the sofa planning to do some work offline and try to connect later just to send it (technology has a funny tendency of working only after some swearing, a cup of tea and some resting later). Taping away when suddenly up pops "Wireless connection available".

The laptop has Intel's heavily hyped Centrino chipset and it has found someone's personal wireless network, either in the flat above or below or possibly the block of flats opposite. Who cares? There's no security on it and although signal strength is Low, down come the emails and websites and up goes the work.

The wireless owner isn't online at the moment as becomes clear when, an hour later, the connection drops to nothing and doesn't appear until later that evening. But in one of those wonderful moments - like the first time you uploaded a file on the World Wide Web or got that first mobile call to tell you everyone had moved to a different pub and you didn't have to go home and watch Noel's House Party - it suddenly dawned that here was a wonderful new technology.

Colombia is not exactly awash with Net connections (most of Latin America still lives on Internet cafes and Hotmail) but somehow here was a fast connection zapped straight into my computer. It cost me nothing and it cost the kind owner nothing - he had already paid for it and took complete control whenever he started up. My life had just been made significantly easier and all it took was two clicks of the mouse.

The same happened again at Madrid airport. Stuck waiting for a connecting flight in just under two hours, it would have been pretty pointless trying to find a Net connection, do something useful and be back in time for boarding. The Net booths are too pricey and too clunky, only really good for a "Hola, guess where I am?" email.

Some lateral thinking however led me to sit outside the VIP room (just a gate down from my flight). Sure enough, another (strong) signal and we're off again. Emails, information, a quick story and catch the plane.

Boingo sorted me out at LAX for the slightly pricey $5 but hey, it would only have been spent on a plastic hamburger anyway. Even Gatwick unloaded its wares once the porter overruled the Information attendant and explained that there actually was a wireless connection area just over there (and after I had failed to crack the security on the internal network on the floor below).

Of course, being British, it shouldn't come as any surprise to find that BT's Openzone hotspot took three times longer to sign up for and connect to. Nor that it didn't explain just how expensive it was going to be (£6 the credit card bill later revealed). But that's the wonderful thing about having BT as your incumbent telecoms supplier. As it turned out, the BT connection provided an email that was of some importance. Without it, nothing could have been done until Monday, when it would have been too late.

So what's my point? Two points. One, wireless technology is fantastic. And inevitable. As society grows more and more dependent on information sent over the Internet, it will become increasingly important to get access to it wherever and whenever you want. Presumably Centrino will take the lion's share of the market as it has done in the processor market - that's what you pay the big marketing bucks for after all ($300m, they say) - but who really gives a toss when the technology simply works and works well?

The second point is that people (and I mean mostly journalists here) must stop confusing healthy cynicism with reactionary snideness. Ever since a lot of people made fools of themselves in the dotcom boom, the trend has been to Spot the Over-Hyped Technology and then go to great lengths to explain why it is doomed to failure.

The great thing about great, new technology is that it enables you to do things simpler, faster and easier. Wireless fits very comfortably in that box. So to argue over business models and take-up, to inflate every small announcement into proof of your pre-determined argument is to miss the point.

Wireless does work and it works really well and it will happen and that's pretty much the end of it. Unfortunately, the same is probably true for 3G but there you go.

Still don't quite understand why Intel hasn't spent some of that $300m in setting up free wireless hotspots though.

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