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Portland connects to top billing for wireless access

Finally, a list Portland tops that we can be proud of . . . sort of.

From the same folks who bring you Money Magazine’s annual "Best Places to Live in America" survey, this just in:

When it comes to wireless hot spots, Portland is the hottest thing going.

TED SICKINGER OregonLive.com

Put another way, Portland is the most "unwired" city in America.

Whoopee.

But what does it mean?

In recent years, Portland and other cities competed for the title of "most-wired" city. But the march of technology has rendered that honor obsolete. The really with-it tech hot spots now tout their ability to support wireless access to the Internet.

And in that embryonic world, Portland has more locations per capita than any other U.S. city where people can use a laptop computer or other handheld device to tap the Internet via a "Wi-Fi," or wireless fidelity network.

Not that many people actually do access the Internet wirelessly. But they could in Portland, thanks largely to grass-roots efforts to provide free wireless access across the city.

Experts admit that wireless Internet access is still an enthusiast’s technology, one limited to hardware geeks, business travelers toting Wi-Fi equipped laptops and people who think a telephone keypad is an acceptable keyboard.

Wi-Fi still faces hurdles to widespread deployment and adoption in the United States, including security problems, incompatible network standards and billing issues.

But "Wi-Fi is going to be a big deal in urban life," insists Sean Maloney, head of the communications group at Intel, which paid for the survey and is in the midst of a high-profile campaign touting a set of chips designed to enable laptop computers to access the Internet wirelessly.

Maloney calls Wi-Fi the most revolutionary technology to hit computers since the Internet browser in the mid-90s.

Market research firm IDC predicts that notebook computers equipped for wireless Internet access will account for 35 percent of all mobile computer sales this year, and 96 percent by 2006.

And for the time being at least, Portland is at the top of the wireless world, according to Bert Sperling, an area resident who is responsible for a variety of Best Places surveys around the country and who conducted this study for Intel. Sperling says the city tops San Francisco; Seattle; Orange County, Calif.; Washington; San Diego; Denver; Boston; Austin, Texas, and all the other supposed tech centers.

The rankings were actually based on a blended score of the number of wireless access points available, the percentage of households with Internet access and the number of wireless phone carriers offering Internet access.

Portland has 88 Wi-Fi hot spots in hotels, coffee shops and the airport. That’s well behind larger metro areas in absolute terms, but a respectable showing when it comes to hot spots per 100,000 people.

Where Portland really shines is in its number of public access points — 130 — where businesses and individuals provide the public with open and free wireless access to the Internet by allowing wireless access to their broadband connection.

Much of the credit goes to Personal Telco, a group of local computer hobbyists that has spent two years persuading individuals and businesses to donate high-speed Internet connections to its cause — creating a "cloud" of free wireless access over the Portland area.

Using specially designed "wireless ethernet" cards, Web surfers within a block or two of the donors’ homes or businesses can tap into the signal. Nigel Ballard, a board member at Personal Telco, said he was pleased with the results of the survey.

"We’re an informed people. We embrace technology," he said. Portland is "a very viral community where good things and bad things get passed around quickly."

And technologywise, "we really do need a shot in the arm."

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