An Unwired Nation? Maybe Next Year

Dial-up may be dreary, but you don't need to hunt for a Starbucks to use it.

The term "always on" once referred just to broadband connections such as cable or DSL. Now it's increasingly being used to describe wireless Internet access on the go via Wi-Fi and cellular connections--and in response, I'm increasingly muttering, "Baloney."

Always on? As a frequent traveler with infrequently good Internet connections, I'd settle for "on when I need it." Mostly what I get instead is a hotel desk clerk mumbling, "I think your phone has some kind of data-port thingy."

Away from home, you can't take anything about connections for granted, as I discovered recently while attending a conference in a pricey Scottsdale, Arizona, hotel. The place had opened for business just a few months earlier, so an optimist might expect it to have its own Wi-Fi network. It didn't. You'd certainly assume it would have high-speed ethernet, and it did--but in only a small fraction of its rooms. Some architectural genius must have declared, "Let 'em eat dial-up!"

Sluggish as it may be, at least dial-up is available where you expect it. At this writing, T-Mobile boasts 2352 Wi-Fi hot spots across the country. Sounds like a lot, but most of those locations are Starbucks shops, and the map shows more than 20 states where the company has no Wi-Fi coverage at all. When I arrive tired and cranky at some Edge City hotel 2000 miles from home, I want to get my mail from the comfort of my room, not hunt for a café that's open late.

There's another problem: price. T-Mobile and Wayport, for instance, each offer unlimited Wi-Fi data service at their hot spots for a steep $30 per month if you sign up for a one-year contract, but you can't roam between the two systems. Use T-Mobile's service on a pay-as-you-go basis, and it will cost you 10 cents per minute--with a $6 minimum. Wayport exacts $7 for a partial day's worth of service at a single airport. Such charges can eat a big hole in your wallet, particularly if you end up with different wireless providers at airport, hotel, and café.

Doing data over cell-phone networks has its own set of frustrations: Even today's best Internet-savvy cellular connections deliver speed about as exciting as dial-up, and coverage areas are spottier than for voice. Cellular pricing policies are goofily inconsistent, too. Sprint charges $10 extra for unlimited data with most voice plans, provided you limit yourself to using a data-enabled phone. Put a computer in the picture, and you need a $180 PC Card--and a data plan that costs a minimum of $40 per month for 20MB, which you could eat up in a few Windows Update downloads. T-Mobile lets you use your phone as a wireless modem for your notebook, but charges even more.

Higher data rates are possible from cellular networks--when they get upgraded. At a recent conference in New Orleans, I tried out a third-generation data network that Verizon had set up temporarily in portions of the city. Results varied, but more than once the prototype PC Card sucked up a snappy 400 kilobits per second.

The bad news: Verizon Wireless has promised to roll out this service only in San Diego and Washington, D.C. this year, with no word about its cost.

Limited availability, mysterious pricing: It's precisely the situation that keeps us plugging old-fashioned modem cords into those data-port thingies.

Click here to view past columns by Contributing Editor Stephen Manes. He has written about technology for the past two decades.