Why people feel aggrieved about public Wifi

More urban WiFi hotspots are not a human right – but they would aid mobility

To IBM, London, for a debate on Wifi organised by spiked-online.com. Chris Bruce, chief executive of BT Openzone, is optimistic. Early on, he says, it was technology suppliers that led public Wifi; but now users are gagging for it. More and more want to use consumer electronics functions, such as cameras, at BT hotspots.

Like many, Bruce believes that different levels of public Wifi service, tiered by price, are coming. Interestingly, he says that as public Wifi installations spread, so use in the open air will grow.

Steve Watkins, a senior consultant with security specialists IT Governance, advises public Wifi users not to get too engrossed in their screens: once lost in digital worlds, they are all too easily stripped of their laptops or more.

Guardian columnist Victor Keegan is rueful. Westminster’s libraries, he notes, charge £6 an hour in for public use, so nobody signs up. The EU, which once led the world with GSM, has now fallen behind the US in Wifi and WiMax. Manhattan’s Central Park, for instance, has full Wifi coverage, even if Nokia provided it.

For Nico Macdonald, a specialist in design and IT, Wifi is the first cheap telecoms gear that people can buy, install and configure themselves. He admits that the 6000 residents on London’s affluent Barbican estate are barely covered by Wifi, but learns from Chris Bruce that one can send a text to be told where the nearest BT hotspot is.

The mayor of San Francisco imagines that Wifi access is a basic human right. But Wifi, Macdonald insists, can’t solve problems of social exclusion or work-life balance. Still, if you have a Nintendo DS games console, you can snap into Wifi action at any McDonald’s restaurant.

From the audience, Sharifah Amirah, of analysts Frost & Sullivan, reminds us that, in Asia, governments have helped lead the development of public Wifi networks. Someone then suggests that public Wifi is about completing tasks when one is broadly on the move. I add that, when Wifi users get frustrated because coverage in Britain is fragmented, this happens because our wider culture no longer regards mobility as cool.

New Labour has started no major motorways, no Crossrail for London or East Coast line for Scotland, and no new airports. Now, in a further sign of official hostility to mobility, London mayor Ken Livingstone wants to charge owners of SUVs and people carriers £25 to drive into the capital.

At this point, Esther Dyson, the doyenne of Internet experts in the US, admonishes me, exclaiming: ‘Take a bus!’

That set me thinking. As it happens, I do take a bus – as well as a car, taxi, train, bike or trainers. And I do that with or without a Wifi-equipped laptop weighing down on shoulders that are strained by years of keyboard use.

But I find those ready to lecture me about my choice of transport mode more authoritarian than any driver of an SUV.

Users of public Wifi, beware! You must always carry your laptop by hand, and never drive it anywhere in a car! To save the planet, shut your laptop down whenever you’re not using it – even if that makes resuming Wifi use a drag!

Once we moralise about mobility and energy use, prospects for public Wifi can only diminish.