eCommerce Times: Wi-Fi Hits the Hinterlands

Rancho Rio, NM,
pervasive hotspot

Broadband wireless Internet is now spreading in rural areas through the mechanism that for the past two decades cable television has used: cash-strapped towns. For years, municipalities sold concessions to cable firms, making deals that almost guaranteed profits to cable companies and allowed the town to take a piece of the action. The patchwork of monopolies made expanding worthwhile to the cable firms, quickly increasing cable's penetration. Now wi-fi companies are selling the same sorts of deals to towns, allowing them to install wireless broadband networks in obscure places like the 103 square mile town of Rio Rancho, NM.

In the small New England towns that pride themselves on birthing the modern notion of direct democratic rule, the traditional town meetings often include reports from the "cable committee." In Nahant, Massachusetts, voters debate not only on which company or technology would be best to bring the Internet to the small coastal community, but also whether or not having the Internet's telecommuters would be a good or a bad influence on the town's culture.

Where mostly urban Internet workers have been limited in the past as to where they could live, those boundaries are rapidly expanding. That means that communities providing ubiquitous broadband may initially prove a novelty that might attract telecommuters, but if the trend becomes quite common, the change may imply little great social upheaval.

Ubiquitous broadband may also prove a problem for the infant wireless marketing industry, as persistent Internet access across towns may obviate the need to reach people via mobile telephones.