Garfinkel: "The real wireless Internet doesn't cost $50 a month- – it's free."

Simson Garfinkel describes the new economics of wireless networking.

The other day, for example, I was at the Boston University school of journalism to have lunch with a friend, but he wasn't there. Realizing that I was half an hour early, I took out my laptop and discovered that I was getting an excellent signal from the school's wireless network. But I didn't just get a signal—the university's network helpfully gave my laptop an address on the Internet. Within moments I was downloading my e-mail and surfing the Web. When I shut down my computer 30 minutes later, the address was automatically returned to the university. And since the J-school's network wasn't running at full capacity at the time, even my minor use of bandwidth had no impact on other users. Total cost to Boston University: zero. (The same thing happened a few weeks later when I was at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.)…

[T]he increase in risk associated with having an open network is minuscule and, ultimately, irrelevant. Telephones in lobbies are so useful that most companies are willing to live with the risk that someone could use them to commission drug deals or call in threats to the White House. With the Internet as large as it is today, trying to increase security by restricting physical access is a losing proposition. Besides, if bad guys are actually in your building, keeping them off your wireless network is probably the least of your worries.

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(via 802.11b Networking News)