Fantasizing about Free Wi-Fi in SF

Good news for San Francisco residents: Google is planning to offer free wireless Internet covering the entire city area.

The media's visions are those of you sending e-mail to granny from Union Square. However, I think it's interesting to take some time to fantasize about the long-term effects of this.

By offering a free, always-on network, they're basically launching a large experiment in ubiquitous computing. As more and more mobile phones / PDAs are coming out with WiFi included, I think people may start downgrading their cell-phone plans. They will use the same phones, but talk for free via Voice-over-IP. [1]

Another effect is that devices will be able to talk to other devices for free: Your MP3 collection could be synced with your car's stereo, without having to connect it to your notebook. Vending machines will be able to ping headquarters and tell them they should send someone with more soft drinks.

Predictions are hard, especially when they concern the future. I'm very interested in how the free Wi-Fi will turn out.

I'm sure this will pay off handsomely for Google. Still, I think they shouldn't display an ad on each page. They will make enough money by being able to show very finely grained contextual ads on their search results or on Google Maps. (e.g. "$3 dollar coupon for the Starbacks to your left - click here!")

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[1] Of course, I'm disregarding some technical details here, for example the need for a decent wireless hand-off protocol like SyncScan to make this work right.