Business Week Discovers WiFi
Business Week has put together one of their “special report” collections of articles all about WiFi, so for the remeaining three people in the world who haven’t realized that WiFi has gone mainstream… there you go. They have the basic how WiFi is catching on in the corporate world article that’s been done often enough – though, they suggest this is just now starting. It touches on all the typical WiFi issues: will commercial hotspots work? how long until the security is better? will 3G compete with WiFi? Other articles in the report include the story of a guy who (get this!) uses WiFi everywhere he goes. He uses it at the office, a cafe across the street from his office, at home, and even at Starbucks when he’s traveling. Sounds like many people I know (or, well, me), but I guess I know too many folks who are a little too involved with the wireless crowd. There is a good article, though, on how South Korea is rushing headfirst into the WiFi revolution too, which is very interesting. South Korea, of course, is known for having a tremendous level of broadband penetration and fairly advanced 3G offerings – so it’s a good way to see how 3G and WiFi can co-exist. They also point out with such widespread WiFi coverage in South Korea, the fixed line broadband providers are offering a “WiFi upgrade” for less than $10/month. They also have their own take on the WiFi vs. 3G thing and are one of the first major publications to actually point out that the two technologies are very different and are good at different things right now – and shouldn’t be looked at (currently) as competitors). To round out this (fairly large) collection of stories, they have 3 “online only” interviews, including Nicholas Negroponte overhyping WiFi, a group of telecom execs talking about their opinions on WiFi (mostly positive, viewing it as an opportunity and not a threat, but that still doesn’t mean they won’t screw it up), and Intel’s Jim Johnson taking credit for making WiFi so popular and predicting where it will go from here. The whole package is wrapped in Intel Centrino ads (as was Wired Mag’s latest issue all about wireless). They sure have gone all out in getting their name associated with WiFi.
