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Despite some tough challenges ahead, I’m rooting for the proposal to Wi-Fi up the entire city of Philadelphia by summer 2006. What a way to help spread around not only e-books, but also much else ranging from neighborhood forums to blogs and PODcasts–while helping small businesses go broadband!

Within the e-book area, faster downloads will help, along with greater portability, but those advantages are just the start. Wi-Fi can be “on” all the time without hogging the phone lines, so people will be able to browse e-book collections more easily and better take advantage of future innovations such as exact linking from spot to spot within books.

Beyond the e-book angle

Remember, those are just the e-book angles. Imagine the many others such as easier use of Internet telephony and innumerable library and K-12 apps.

Admittedly, many questions remain. For example, TechDirt notes that greedy patent holders want a piece of the action via sleazy claims that they waited to make until Wi-Fi really caught on. The blog also says that a wait for more advanced technologies could be worth it. And what about the risk of stringent filtering of Web content?

Ideally, however, solutions will be found.

Solutions

Perhaps when cities understand the price of having such a backwards U.S. Patent Office, for example, Philly congress members and others can pressure the Office to institute reforms to be friendlier to consumers and competition.

As for the costs, analysis might show that WiFi might be inexpensive enough, given the benefits, for Philadelphia and other cities to go ahead even with other alternatives on the way. Or perhaps the solution would be to do a scaled-down verison of WiFi and expand services when the improved technologies arrive. Might one solution even be a Wi-Fi/Wi-Max hybrid?

Filtering? That can be solved, ideally, through proper education of policymakers, so that they realize that a strict approach would provide to be a disaster for interactivity.

Meanwhie thanks to Rochelle at LISNews for providing links from AP and WiFi Planet.

Some other links

–Philadelphia Considers Free Citywide Wireless Access, via Slashdot.

–Philadelphia goes wireless, via VOA.

–San Francisco to expand free WiFi, community computers, via the Philadelphia Inquirer.

–More areas connnect to Internet ‘hot spots’, via the Newark Star-Ledger.

–New Mexico City Hopes for WiFi Access by Christmas, via eWeek.

–Now Taiwan wants to be the biggest WiFi hotspot, via engadget.

 
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