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Wild West not quite Wi-Fi West

We privileged West Coasters can quickly get a distorted sense of how far the wireless revolution has progressed. The bad part of a recent three-week tour of interior Western states was how few destination travel spots have wireless Internet access.

The Seattle Times

The good part was that Wi-Fi expansion seems inevitable. If growth is ever to reawaken in the technology business, wireless Internet deserves to be the prime instigator.

To put things in perspective, it’s important to remember that less than a decade ago there was little online access anywhere outside of major cities. If you wanted to check e-mail and otherwise log into an online service while on the road, you often had to call long distance to your home-area number.

Even three or four years ago, well after the Internet became firmly rooted as the universal online system, it was a challenge to gain high-speed access once you left the West Coast technosphere. You could always fall back on dial-up, but you had to have a phone line (e.g., a motel room — campers and RVers need not apply) and local access number to do it. And access speeds were slow, of course.

Today things have improved significantly. In touristy Utah, Nevada and Arizona towns, I had little trouble tracking down Internet cafes with high-speed DSL connections. Most cost in the neighborhood of $10 to $12 an hour — and they were almost always jammed with travelers doing everything from checking their itineraries to downloading their e-mail.

The caveats were that you had to use the cafe’s terminals and often had to sit in cramped or uncomfortable settings.

At Moab, Utah’s Slick Rock cafe, where five terminals were set impossibly close together, I found it easier to stand at the keyboard than jostle elbows with my neighboring surfers.

If you asked around in places like St. George, Utah, and Moab about wireless access, you got the classic swivel-eyed "what’s that?" look. Not only was there no Wi-Fi available, people didn’t even know what it was.

In Sedona, Ariz., I found an Internet cafe where the manager brightly informed me that wireless access was coming soon. As for details like who the provider was, how much it would cost and what network it would use — well, those were imponderables to be addressed by a higher authority.

"We’ve got the computer," the manager said. "We’re just waiting for a wireless thingie to get installed." Someone else was handling all that.

The prevalence of Internet-cafe access, even in remote backwaters, convinced me Wi-Fi will be the next logical move. Lodgings can use it as a promotional come-on (as many already are doing on the Left Coast). Restaurants, bookstores and cafes can reclaim valuable floor space by doing away with desks and terminals. Even places like convenience stores and gas stations will find Wi-Fi a useful customer lure.

Another logical outlet is libraries, many of which offer Internet access via PC terminals. A librarian I spoke with in Blue Diamond, Nev., where two PCs were available for public Internet use, spoke enthusiastically about the benefits of wireless technology for information sciences.

Accustomed to finding a Starbucks offering T-Mobile wireless Internet wherever I go on the West Coast, I was surprised at how many interior communities lack the coffee chain. I thought these guys were everywhere, but apparently even Starbucks has room to expand.

One problem might be T-Mobile’s network. I have a T-Mobile cellphone, which found no signal across much of the vast emptiness of Utah, as well as destination spots like Springdale and Moab.

Approaching the final leg of our tour, we stopped in Pasadena, Calif., for groceries. Walking the soups and bread aisle, I overheard a couple of Gen-Xers talking.

"We’re adding new routers to the network because the range of 802.11 is generally pretty constricted," one was telling the other. It felt great to be back on the West Coast again.

Paul Andrews is a free-lance technology writer and co-author of "Gates." He can be reached at [email protected]

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company

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