Boston view
Internet cafes find the price is right for wireless service

By Simson L. Garfinkel
Special to The Seattle Times

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The Internet cafe is fast becoming a reality — just not the way we expected.

Way back in 1997, Internet cafes were all the rage. They offered decent coffee, acceptable pastries, a high-speed Internet connection and lots of desktop computers running Windows 95.

How times change. These days there are lots of coffee shops and restaurants where you can get high-speed Internet access. But now, even better, the Internet access is wireless — and it's free.

One restaurant where I've spent hours sipping coffee, eating lentil soup, and reading e-mail is Mama Gaia's Café in Central Square of Cambridge, Mass. Besides being the only community coffee shop whose Web site had a photo of a military tank, an advertisement for Fair Trade Coffee and a JavaScript-enabled "investor relations" button, Mama Gaia's also has a DSL line and a little Wi-Fi wireless-access point.

The cost to Mama Gaia's can't be much: an EarthLink DSL connection in Cambridge costs just $50 a month, or less than $2 a day. The total hardware investment is less than $450, and that's before rebates. If Mama Gaia sells just two extra cups of coffee a day because of its DSL connection, the circuit turns a profit.

For restaurants that want to provide wireless Internet service to customers, the Internet really is too cheap to meter. It would cost Mama Gaia's much more to build an Internet billing infrastructure than it would ever recoup from customers.

Pick the right seat

Another Cambridge establishment where I've had free wireless Internet access is Carberry's Bakery & Coffee House. Carberry's doesn't have a wireless access point, but a nearby business does. It turns out that if you sit at just the right location inside the store, you can pick up that company's Wi-Fi network and, from there, hop on to the Internet.

In recent months there has been a lot written about businesses that inadvertently allow their wireless connections to be eavesdropped and even covertly used. All too often, it seems, a business will set up a wireless access point without any security whatsoever and then plug it into their network behind its firewall.

This practice is quite risky. It allows practically anyone nearby with a laptop and an $80 wireless card to have full run of the company's internal network. Recently, an FBI agent in Boston told me about a New England software development company that ended up losing $10 million in contracts when the company's internal e-mail was stolen and posted on a Web site. Apparently, the e-mail had been taken through an unsecured wireless-access point.

But granting wireless access doesn't have to be dangerous. As long as a company puts the wireless access point outside its firewall, would-be hackers coming in through the access point don't pose any more of a threat than other hackers on the Internet outside that same firewall.

Because there are so many of these so-called wireless hot spots around town, I'm now in the practice of sliding my Wi-Fi card into my laptop anytime I'm working in a coffee shop for more than an hour. After all, you never know when there might be a nearby access point.

Then came Starbucks

So I wasn't terribly surprised last week when I discovered an excellent wireless signal in a Harvard Square Starbucks. More than a year ago, Starbucks announced its plans to offer high-speed wireless access. But I was surprised when I engaged my Web browser: Instead of accessing my e-mail, I was presented with an invitation to type in my credit-card number. Starbucks, the king of the $4 coffee, wanted me to pay for a service that should be too cheap to meter.

As it turns out, the wireless signal inside the Starbucks was actually being provided by the old MobileStar network: a network acquired by VoiceStream Wireless in January after MobileStar filed for bankruptcy. The network has since been rebranded T-Mobile Wireless Broadband.

You can now get this wireless service in 575 locations throughout the United States — most of them Starbucks.

The company doesn't officially offer service in Cambridge yet, but the service that was there seemed to work. But the price didn't.

For a service that Mama Gaia's can offer for free, T-Mobile wanted me to pay $2.99 for 15 minutes of unlimited service, or $20 for 120 minutes — not a significant savings. The company would also sell me unlimited local service for $29.99 a month, or unlimited nationwide service for $49.99 a month.

But there's a catch: those unlimited services really aren't — the time is unlimited, but if you transfer more than 500 megabytes in a month, you'll be charged 25 cents for each additional megabyte — more than $2 to download a copy of Netscape Communicator. These prices are quite high.

Signing up anyway

Not surprisingly, T-Mobile, a business unit of Deutsche Telekom, is making the same mistake with its other U.S.-based high-speed wireless network: VoiceStream's high-speed data network based on the GPRS cellular telephone data standard. This service, called the T-Mobile Internet Service Plan, starts at $19.95 per month for up to 5 megabytes of data transferred, $5 for each additional megabyte. VoiceStream's high-end service is $59.99 per month for up to 20 megabytes of information transferred, $4 for each additional megabyte — or $32 to download that copy of Netscape.

Pricing like this will prevent high-speed wireless services from ever catching on with the American public.

Today these high-speed wireless networks are largely underused. Companies should be looking for ways to expand their customer base and the awareness of their product.

They shouldn't be looking for ways to charge as much as they can from today's early adopters.

Simson L. Garfinkel is a freelance tech writer based in New England.

Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company