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This weekend the Wi-Fi connection in my apartment vanished. I spent 48 solid, uninterrupted hours without e-mail, YouTube, Wordpress or even so much as a weather update. Productivity skyrocketed. I actually read a newspaper, mopped the floors, cooked a balanced dinner and organized my closet. Who knew that I spent so much valuable time wandering aimlessly all over the Internet, stopping to spend half an hour on celebrity gossip sites and wasting endless moments jumping between recipe sites and bookmarking meals that I never actually get around to cooking. It was a refreshing mini-vacation—but it couldn’t last.

Yesterday I broke down and walked over to the local coffee shop that serves bland, watered-down coffee in exchange for free Wi-Fi. As I waded through a mass of e-mails, caught up on the latest Internet gossip and chatted with friends on Instant Messenger I realized how good it felt to be connected again.

Back at my Wi-Fi-less apartment, I pondered the future of Wi-Fi. Is it only a matter of time before every city offers some basic Wi-Fi service to its citizens, like Portland, Paris and Albuquerque, with varying degrees of success? Or will it follow Dublin’s lead and abandon a public Wi-Fi system because it proved too large for the city to manage. Or will we see more small business attracting users by offering free Wi-Fi to paying customers? I imagine it will be a mix and match of services. No matter what the result I can only hope that it will end in lower, more budget-friendly wireless packages from the Telecom giants that keeps even the humble blogger constantly connected.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.