Coffee shop in Mattoon, IL, offers free Wi-Fi: Mattoon is a small town, about 40 to 80 miles from larger population centers as the crow flies and much longer by major interstates. The first free Wi-Fi in town rates a full news story with photograph, and quotes from other shops thinking about adding service.
I've been getting email from people who have read various stories I've written about free Wi-Fi in restaurants who are wrestling with how to offer free service while maintaining necessary security and bandwidth throttling for their own purposes. I'll be writing soon about the right hardware for that job.
Looking forward to your comments about the realities of setting up a free hotspot. It's a few years now that we've been talking about this stuff. But I still can't see any easy to deploy solution that does it properly. Sure, anyone can put up a $99 AP and leave it wide open. But there are lots of reasons why a private individual shouldn't want to do this, and many more why a business definitely shouldn't want to. As far as I can tell the Hotspot-in-a-box products all assume that you want to charge via a mainstream WISP. I hope you can tell me otherwise.
BTW. What exactly is in those Hotspot-in-a-box products that makes them 2-10 the price of a Linksys WRT54G??
I would love to see a simple solution to put my AP in public mode to the internet but whenever I needed to use it, my traffic would have priority over "guest" traffic. Probably the OS in the AP's could have this feature.